THHH 






Qass_ 
Book 



PRESENTED BV 



JESUS AND LIFE 



JESUS AND LIFE 



BY 

REV. JOSEPH F. McFADYEN, M.A. 

PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND 
EXEGESIS, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, KINGSTON, CANADA 



NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



./1 2+3 



-£■?■ 



TO MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. LIFE AS JESUS SAW IT 13 

II. WHY ARE YOU AFRAID LIKE THIS ? 21 

III. STRANGERS, BUT NOT PILGRIMS 33 

IV. THE STRAIN OF CHRISTIANITY 40 
V. JESUS THE TEACHER 48 

VI. JESUS' USE OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE 58 

VII. THE SILENCE OF THE GOSPELS 71 
VIII. GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS 80 

IX. THE COLOUR QUESTION 97 

X. THE WOMEN OF THE GOSPEL STORY IO7 

XI. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE II9 

XII. THE FULL LIFE OR THE EMPTY LIFE ? 134 

XIII. PAIN 144 

XIV. BEARING THE CROSS 151 
XV. AN EMERGENCY CODE ? 158 

XVI. THE STRONG MAN DESPOILED 165 



Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVII. NEW HEAVENS 174 

XVIII. THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF REVENGE 187 

XIX. SHALL WE SMITE WITH THE SWORD ? I97 

XX. A NEW EARTH 208 

XXI. THE CHRISTIAN HOME 213 

XXII. CESAR'S SPHERE AND GOD'S 226 

XXIII. WHO VEILETH HIS EYES 240 

XXIV. FOUR ATTITUDES TO THE BROTHER 258 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 
INDEX 275 



PREFACE 

When our Lord came to earth, many were waiting 
for the Kingdom of God. So clear-cut was theii 
picture of the Kingdom that when it did come in 
another guise they did not recognise it. Once more 
men are waiting for the Kingdom of God. We 
have prayed for revival ; and we can conceive no 
revival which does not express itself in repentance, 
faith, and prayer ; and in a deepened loyalty to the 
organised associations for Christian worship and 
service. 

But in the New Testament we read not only of the 
Christ but also of the Baptist. There were men who 
were not far from the Kingdom, yet who had been 
baptised only with John's baptism, who still lacked 
the quickening breath of Holy Spirit, did not even 
know of the existence of Holy Spirit. 

Some months ago the writer attended a meeting 
held to discuss methods of helping the " depressed 
classes " of India. One of the speakers, a Hindu 
gentleman, after lauding the work that Christian 
missions have done for the depressed classes, went 
on to urge that missionaries should cease their efforts 

9 



Preface 

to win the higher castes. He gave the curious reason 
that the Brahmins of India will adopt Christianity 
though they will never call themselves Christians. 

Does not that shed a light on much that is happen- 
ing in the world to-day ? Everywhere and in all 
departments of life, not least among working men, 
women, the coloured races and small nations, we are 
witnessing a revolt of the unprivileged classes against 
the privileged. In their essence the new movements 
are an insistent demand that the world shall accept 
Jesus' conception of the infinite significance of each 
human being. The toilers of our Western cities, 
as they climb their Pisgah, the teeming millions of 
the Orient as they dare to lift up their heads, seldom 
acknowledge the source of their inspiration, often are 
not themselves conscious of it ; but we hear the 
voice of Jesus in their demand to be regarded as 
citizens in the great commonwealth of God. 

Everyone who knows anything of the life of the 
Indian student of to-day must have marvelled at the 
response of educated young India to Christian ideals 
of social service. Jesus Christ never mastered the 
minds of men as He does to-day. It is better to 
follow Him, even though blindly and sullenly, than 
to say, " Lord, Lord," while refusing to do the things 
that He says. We are realising as we never realised 
before that the Christianising of men, of all men, 
in all their relations, is not so much a matter of 

10 



Preface 

interest to the Church as a matter of life or death for 
the world. We have need, in the light that Jesus 
gives us, to study God's working in the world around 
us, lest haply we be found fighting even against God. 

In this volume the aim has been to convey, as 
far as possible in non-technical language, one's 
conception of some aspects of the message of Jesus 
for the moral and social life of the age. The book has 
been written under various difficulties, not the least 
of which was the loss of the results of much work 
by the torpedoing of the steamer in which I was 
coming home from India. 

I am deeply indebted to Dr. McFadyen, the 
general editor of the series, for unremitting help in 
the preparation of the book, and for seeing the book 
through the press during my absence in France ; 
also to my wife for correcting the proof-sheets. 

I have made constant use of Dr. Moffatt's " Trans- 
lation of the New Testament," but have not con- 
sciously adopted any of his renderings without 
separate acknowledgment. Quotations from the 
Psalms and from the Wisdom Books are given as 
in Dr, McFadyen's "The Psalms in Modern Speech" 
and " The Wisdom Books in Modern Speech." 

J. F. McFadyen. 

Greenock, 

1st December, 1917, 



11 



CHAPTER I 
Life as Jesus saw it 

" Jesus and Life " : the collocation of terms seems 
so natural that most of us have almost forgotten that a 
religion may have other ideals than life. Conceptions 
of the kind of life that Jesus came to bring vary 
from age to age ; the tendency in our own generation 
is to give the word a far wider range than in the days 
of the supremacy of asceticism. But that the 
message of Jesus is a message for life is a Christian 
axiom. 

We assume that the teaching of Jesus had reference 
in the first place to the state of things that had come 
within His own experience. Accordingly, before 
we ask what Jesus has to teach us about life, there 
is a prior question : What did Jesus know about 
life ? To one who has spent one's life in the Euro- 
pean quarter of an Indian city India may be an all but 
unknown country. And so we ask : Did Jesus 
know life, this life we have to live, in all its sordidness 
and pain as well as its goodness and gladness ; and 
how did it all seem to Him ? 

Jesus was a doctor, albeit one who employed 
unusual methods. He knew of life what any doctor 
knows. He bad seen much of repulsive diseases, 

13 



Jesus and Life 

had seen human beings writhing with pain while 
those who loved them had to stand by helpless. 
He knew too in how many cases disease is due to 
vice. Jesus was a religious teacher. He held 
private interviews with men and women who were 
dissatisfied with their lives, many of them no doubt 
with good reason ; and even if they did not always 
tell their story frankly, the Gospels emphasise that 
He had in an unusual degree the power to read 
people's thoughts. He conducted a ministry to 
harlots. He knew how they came to be harlots 
and why the class is so large. 

Jesus was not a lawyer, but on at least one occa- 
sion He was asked to decide a disputed inheritance ; 
and there is abundant evidence that He had made a 
special study of the avarice that does so much to keep 
the lawyers busy. Perhaps to none of these professions 
would the politican yield the palm as an expert in 
human nature. Though Jesus Himself refused to enter 
the greasy arena of politics, He had no lack of oppor- 
tunity for studying the aims and methods of masters 
of the science. 

Many social circles knew Jesus, though He did not 
move much among the leaders of society : when He 
was presented to the High Priest, the King, the 
Governor, in each case it was in the capacity of a 
prisoner being tried on a capital charge. Yet He was 
no stranger in the homes of the rich. He knew the 
glamour of the big house where hospitality involves 
no fine calculation of resources, of the luxurious 
appointments, the arrangements for comfort, the 

14 



Life as Jesus saw it 

surroundings where there is everything to please 
and nothing to offend the cultured taste. But for 
the most part we find Jesus amid other scenes. If 
we would follow Him we must be prepared to keep 
strange company, beggars, thieves, lepers, prostitutes, 
all kinds of impossible people. We have to learn not 
only to keep company with them but to admire them, 
to find them lovable, and harder still, to love them. 
We find ourselves expected to meet in a friendly way 
men and women who do not belong to our own caste, 
to cease to look at them as if we were looking at them 
from another planet, to cease to speak to them 
as if they were at the other end of a long-distance 
telephone. To follow Jesus'will transform our social 
life. New faces will appear at our dinner tables, 
new friends will bid us welcome in their homes. As 
we step out from our social cage and come to know 
something of men and women, we cease to feel good 
because we have accepted the invitation to Levi's 
party, when we had the option of a reception at 
Simon's. 

Jesus believed in the common meal as an oppor- 
tunity for learning to know men and enabling men 
to know Him. We often see Him as guest. Only 
twice do we see Him as host, but when He entertained 
He entertained with royal hospitality : the meal on 
the grass by the lake-side where a few loaves and 
fish and the power of God satisfied five thousand 
weary and hungry followers, uninvited but welcome 
guests ; the Supper in the upper room, the one feast 
to which guests of Jesus came by invitation, where the 

15 



Jesus and Life 

bread He gave them meant His body, and the cup 
His blood. 

Our Lord knew people of all kinds, knew them inti- 
mately at their best and at their worst. He knew crime 
and lust and misery and pain. But we are almost 
more reassured by the fact that He knew life in its 
squalor, the unspeakable squalor of Oriental poverty 
and disease. When we have met an Indian begging 
leper, seen his loathsome sores, heard his raucous 
persistent cries ; when our whole soul has revolted 
and we have felt but one desire, to flee and shut the 
horrible thing out of our eyes, out of our ears, out of 
our memories — suddenly like an inspiration the 
thought has occurred to us : the beggars and the sick 
people of the Gospel stories we have always loved were 
just like that. We had always thought of them 
as clean beggars, romantic invalids. Here is the 
reality. The same hideous disfigurements that meet 
our eyes met His eyes ; the same hoarse maddening 
cries that fall on our ears fell on His ears. Jesus 
must have known that subtlest of all temptations — 
the suggestion that the whole life is so squalid that 
it is not worth considering, the feeling that even God 
cannot take much account of such human wreckage. 

Man's inhumanity to man was no sealed book to 
Jesus. He had seen the extortion of the tax-gatherers, 
the methods by which the priests beggared widows. 
He knew of the robbers that lay in wait for travellers, 
of money-lenders who tortured their debtors by every 
artifice of the law till they had paid the last farthing 
of their debt. He was aware that justice is some- 

16 



Life as Jesus saw it 

times administered by judges who have no fear of 
God or man. He had heard of Pilate slaying Galilean 
worshippers as they offered their sacrifices. He had 
seen the caste system at work in a form, less 
elaborate perhaps, but hardly less virulent, than that 
which obtains in modern India. He had heard 
educated men indignantly protesting when He had 
relieved a man in pain or a woman in distress, because 
the healing act happened to be a technical infringe- 
ment of a traditional rider to a ceremonial . law. 
Every day He saw the hungry sheep looking up, 
and the shepherds, instead of feeding them, donned 
vestments and struck attitudes and called on the 
sheep to admire them. Jesus had seen the greatest 
prophet of all time lose his head because he had 
called a woman's sin by the name by which God calls 
it. And He knew the murder in the hearts of the 
priests whose claims and whose lives He was bringing 
under the pitiless light of reality. 

Jesus had experience too of the mystery of suffering 
for which no human being is responsible. He knew 
that this is a world in which a widow may lose her 
only son. in which a tower may fall and crush its 
victims in indiscriminate slaughter ; a world in 
which winds may blow, storms beat, and floods 
be let loose, to overthrow all human structures that 
are not founded on a rock. Jesus had read history 
too, at least the chequered history of His own people, 
with its record of slavery, and famine, and pestilence, 
ambitious rulers, cruel and greedy rich men, bloody 
fighting, disastrous defeat, and exile. 

17 



Jesus and Life 

How did all this appeal to Jesus ? With His 
knowledge of life and men, was He still an optimist ? 
Like most questions that are worth asking about 
Jesus, this question cannot be answered with a simple 
" Yes " or " No." It is easy to effervesce about the 
joy and the glory of life, to find poetry and romance 
in life's most tragic or sordid phases. But Jesus 
saw the tragic in all its tragedy, the sordid in all 
its sordidness. His optimism did not consist in 
throwing a silk coverlet over a muck-heap. 

Jesus was a realist. But He would not have 
acknowledged as realism any view of the world that 
regards it as a combination of a gaol, a hospital, and 
a house of ill-fame. He saw the facts ; but He saw 
all the facts. The pessimist concentrates his attention 
on the birds that die of hunger and cold. Jesus says :— - 
" Look at the myriads of birds that your Father 
feeds." The pessimist is so obsessed by the towers 
that fall that he forgets the vastly greater number 
of towers that remain erect. If there are in the world 
widows weeping for their only sons, there are also 
Peters shedding tears of remorse because it has been 
brought home to them that their sin is a sin against 
immortal love, and there are Magdalenes whose 
tears are not tears of grief but of repentance and 
new hope. 

The daily work of Jesus brought Him into an 
atmosphere of weakness and pain, brought Him 
into the closest contact with the blind and the deaf, 
lepers and demoniacs ; and Jesus could never see pain 
without feeling it ; yet He never forgot that most 

18 



Life as Jesus saw it 

men are neither blind nor deaf, neither insane nor 
lepers. In spite of the multitude of His patients it 
is not the hospital atmosphere we breathe in the Gospel 
story, but the free air of hill and sea. 

Jesus realised too that the Pharisees, Herod, and 
Pilate, did not make up human kind. There were 
Simeons and Annas in Jerusalem as well as scribes ; 
there was a Nicodemus among the Pharisees and 
a Joseph of Arimathaea in the Sanhedrin. The 
bitterness with which the Gospel writers speak of 
Judas is a reflection of Jesus' own judgment of his 
crime ; but the betrayal by Judas was never suffered 
to obscure the loyalty of the eleven. If there are 
robbers who lie in wait for 'lonely travellers, there 
are good Samaritans ready to risk their own lives 
in helping them. The creditor who gets his insolvent 
debtor by the throat may be a common type, but he is 
not the only type of creditor ; and there are kindly 
masters who will give their workmen more than their 
legal due. 

Jesus was an optimist in this sense, that much 
of the pain in the world He viewed as temporary and 
remediable. If there is blindness, it can be cured ; 
if there is leprosy, it can be cleansed. The poor we 
have always with us, but we need not have them 
with us if only men were kinder. It is not difficult 
for a doctor or even a clergyman who does his work 
in a professional spirit to face daily the scenes that 
Jesus faced and still preserve a bright outlook on 
life. But those who lift burdens by sharing them 
will exhaust mind and heart as well as body. This 

19 



Jesus and Life 

was our Lord's method ; yet never once does He 
wonder whether it is " worth while." Once, in the 
story of the epileptic boy, Jesus expresses impatience : 
" Faithless generation, how long shall I be with 
you ? How long shall I bear with you ? "■ 
The exception proves the rule, since He is 
impatient, not at the boy's agony or the father's 
distress, but at the faithlessness that will not take 
advantage of the rivers of God's grace flowing 
freely for those who will avail themselves of them. 
We wish to know especially what Jesus thought 
of life as a whole. Are the deeds of kindness to which 
He calls us but the work of the stretcher-bearers 
after Armageddon ; or has He a heart to believe and 
to bid us believe that there is love in the universe 
that will reveal itself more and more till it has con- 
quered all ? Is this old earth of ours a derelict ship, 
or in spite of the darkness and the lowering storms 
can we hear the reassuring cry of the sailor on the 
watch : — " All's well ; lights burning brightly " ? 



1 Mark g x 9. 



20 



CHAPTER II 
Why are You Afraid Like This ? « 

That question represents Jesus' attitude to the 
most disconcerting facts in life. It is not only that 
He Himself never feels fear. He can hardly under- 
stand it in others, at least in those who profess to 
have faith in God. The fearlessness of Jesus was 
not due, as courage so often is, to temperament. 
One whose pity overflowed so readily and so gener- 
ously into fatiguing action must have had a nature 
sensitive beyond our conception. The sense of shame 
that made Jesus stoop and write on the ground in 
presence of the adulteress and her shameless and 
lascivious accusers reminds us that His soul must 
often have quivered with a sense of outrage at things 
the people around Him regarded as all in the day's 
work. 

Nor was Jesus' untroubled outlook on life the 
natural attitude of one who has escaped those ex- 
periences that shake the faith and break the will. 
• Forces material and spiritual conspire to thwart Him 
in His work and turn Him from the path that God 
has set before Him. The waters of the Sea of 
Galilee threaten to engulf Him and bring His work 
1 Mark 440. Dr. Mofifatt's translation. 
21 



Jesus and Life 

to a premature close. His fellow-townsmen try to 
hurl Him over a cliff. The ceremonialists plot against 
His life and at last plot successfully. He is betrayed 
with a kiss. All this was only wrestling against 
visible foes. But Jesus knew that the enemy with 
power is the enemy within. It was out of the 
fullness of His own experience that He pictured 
the narrowness of the road that leads to Life, the 
difficulty of finding it. Throughout His ministry 
He had to struggle against the temptation to take 
the popular and easy course ; the sting of the temp- 
tation lying in this, that the easy course could so 
speciously be represented as the path of righteousness : 
for was it not the road that ensured the safety of 
God's Son, the sure and speedy triumph of God's 
kingdom ? 

Jesus' fearlessness in the face of what we call 
the evils of life is not a triumph over fear. He sees 
nothing to be afraid of. God is His Father. The 
Kingdom which those whom His Father blesses are to 
inherit has been prepared from the foundation of the 
world. His Father's plans cannot go awry. Every- 
thing that happens, most of all the plans laid for 
His destruction, happen " as it is written " ; happen 
as even long ago the insight of men in tune with 
God's will had shown them God's plans must work 
themselves out. Jesus wants us too to think of God 
in this way. He asks us to have no thought of God 
that is not a filial thought. 

And so Jesus dispels the biggest fear of all, what 
we might call fear of the universe, the fear that the 

22 



Why are You Afraid Like This ? 

world is a rudderless ship, that there is no God, 
only remorseless law ; the fear that God, if there is 
a God, has set the world a-spinning and now takes 
His rest, heedless of the groans of those who have 
been maimed by the machinery He has set in motion ; 
the fear that the spirits who rule the universe, if 
there are such spirits, are malicious beings who delight 
to hurt us. Jesus does not reason about any of 
these views of the world. He ignores them. He 
knew as none of us can know the dark experiences 
that drive men to these wild expedients of thought. 
But the pure in heart see God. They see Him every- 
where and they see Him as He is. Jesus had no need 
to argue or to fight down doubts. He had no doubts 
to fight down. As the child of affectionate parents 
never doubts their love whatever may happen, 
never reasons about it or seeks to prove it, so Jesus 
has a conviction that nothing can shake, that God is 
His Father and that all is well. Or rather, it is not 
a conviction, it is knowledge. One of His favourite 
maxims was that if we would learn of God and the 
things of God we must cultivate the child spirit. 
This also is from His own experience. His know- 
ledge of God was not the student's knowledge but 
the Son's. 

Even if the world is our Father's world, may there 
not be in it evil spirits with both the will and the 
power to hurt us ? One of the reasons that Christ- 
ianity has lost something of its appeal is just that it 
has done its work so well. We have forgotten the 
pit from which we were dug. We know only as a 

23 



Jesus and Life 

piece of curious information that there were and are 
millions of people whose world is peopled with malig- 
nant powers that only wait their opportunity to 
work their will on them. Jesus attached enormous 
importance to His campaign against the demons, 
and the power to cast them out was an essential part 
of the equipment of the apostles. Was Jesus right 
in giving Satan an independent personality and in 
picturing the world as full of malignant demons ? 
Are there, as Jesus and the Gospels represent, 
legions of angels always ready to come to the help 
of the pious in distress ? We are no fit judges. Our 
eyes are so bleared with factory smoke, our ears so 
dulled by the rattle of machinery, our. souls so 
starved with our quest for money and gaiety, that 
the sights and sounds of the spiritual world are not 
for us. 

One of the paradoxes of the history of thought 
is that the age of machines, every one of which in 
their origin, their construction, and their daily oper- 
ation, bore testimony to intellect, and will, and a 
whole spiritual world, for a time nearly drove the 
spiritual world from the thoughts of educated men; 
and even yet we have only partially recovered it. 
We must wait awhile before we know whether we 
Sadducees or Jesus and His followers were right in 
this matter of angels and spirits. And we wait 
without fear ; for Jesus has abundantly proved to us 
that, if there are demons, they are demons under 
control, and if there are angels, they are God's 
angels. 

24 



Why are You Afraid Like This ? 

After all, the question is chiefly of sentimental 
interest. We may strongly suspect that some of the 
angels of which we read in the New Testament were 
angels of flesh and blood, as are most of the angels 
with which we ourselves have any dealings. And 
whether there are discarnate fiends, there are beyond 
a doubt incarnate fiends. Even to Jesus, Satan 
was not always an incorporeal existence, but might 
take the form of a loved apostle. Men are God's 
children, but some of them have left the Home and gone 
abroad because they would not keep the Father's 
rules. Have the children of the Home nothing to 
fear from those who have left the Home because they 
were of a different spirit ? . There is nothing to be 
gained by underestimating what men can do to us. 
Men can do to us very terrible things. They can 
cause us physical pain, even torture. They can rob 
us of our goods, injure us in our work or in our 
prospects, take from us our good name. They can 
cause us mental anguish. Do we not well to be afraid 
of them ? 

" No ! " says Jesus, " Their power is very 
limited. They can only kill the body." " Only 
kill the body/' we say. " Is not that the most 
terrible of all things ? " Not in the judgment of 
Jesus ; not if we are living the filial life. He speaks 
of death as a somewhat unimportant incident in a 
man's career. " Do not be afraid of those who 
kill the body and after that," after that trifle, " are 
helpless to do anything further." 1 Our enemies 
x Luke I2«. 
25 



Jesus and Life 

can cause us pain, horrible pain ; but their work 
is all external. They cannot injure us in our man- 
hood and womanhood^ And once more was not 
Jesus thinking of Himself ? The Pharisees could 
kill the body of Jesus. Jesus Himself they could not 
reach. 

We note then a point that in all our reasonings 
on the subject we readily forget. We are for the 
most part interested mainly in the welfare of our 
bodies. " A prosperous business man " does not 
mean a man who manages to conduct his business 
without wronging his neighbour. When a woman 
has " made a good match " it is not safe to infer that 
her husband is rich in faith and hope and love. It 
would be untrue to suggest that when our Jobs 
contend with God, their chief grievance is the loss 
of their oxen and asses, their sheep and camels ; 
but we do them no injustice in attributing to 
such a source no inconsiderable part of their 
problem. Job was a healthy and a rich man 
when the Satan was allowed to test him, rich in 
material possessions and in human love. It was 
the abundance of his wealth, material and spiritual, 
that made his trial possible. His view of the re- 
lation of the soul to the material environment was 
that both should prosper together. He had to learn 
that while this is so ultimately, it is so only ulti- 
mately ; and in the meantime spiritual welfare may 
be consistent with material poverty and much pain. 
With Jesus pusillanimity, narrow-mindedness and 
short-sightedness, is one of the deadly sins. Thinking 

26 



Why are You Afraid Like This ? 

of ourselves and forgetting others, considering the 
bodily and the material and neglecting the unseen 
things that abide, remembering the present and 
ignoring the limitless future, that is what leads 
astray. 

But, after all, if we have in any way caught the 
spirit of Jesus, our worst fears are not for ourselves 
at all, but for the terrible things that may 
happen to those we love. What of the parents 
in an invaded country who have to stand by 
while their children are tortured and their 
daughters ravished? Has Jesus any message 
for them ? And we think again and ask our- 
selves : Is it quite true . that our enemies can 
never get down to our manhood and our woman- 
hood, cannot make us worse men and women ? 
Are there no circumstances in which we cannot 
say, "We are still masters of our souls"? What 
of the white slave traffic, aye and the black and 
the brown slave traffic though we do not hear so 
much about it, where the souls as well as the bodies 
of our sisters are destroyed in hell ? And is 
there no such thing as tyranny that treats men 
like brute beasts until they become something 
not very unlike brute beasts ? Jesus' faith was 
never the faith of want of knowledge or want of 
thought. He had seen it all. Before the body of 
Jesus bled on Calvary His heart had bled for all the 
wrong and the pain that are in the world. He felt 
it as only the pure can feel it. Better, He said, 
be drowned in the deepest sea than be guilty of 

27 



Jesus and Life 

leading one of God's humble ones astray. And if 
God does not forget those who lead them astray, 
we may be quite sure He does not forget the 
victims themselves. Their cries by day and by 
night are in the ears of God. 

There is one more source of fear. What of 
nature ? What of fire and flood, storm and earth- 
quake, famine and pestilence ? To Jesus the sun is 
God's sun and the rain is God's rain. 1 Does He 
know that God's sun, if untempered by God's rain, 
causes famine which in a single country in a single 
year sweeps off the people by the hundred thousand ? 
What has He to say to plague, which in India in 
recent years has counted its victims by the myriad, 
which takes with impartial hand the old and the 
young, the weakly and the strong, and sits for months 
together like a brooding terror on the hearts of the 
people ? Jesus had studied the Bible. He knew 
all we can know of " natural calamities." Old 
Testament saints had wrestled with their doubts. 
If Jesus had ever to justify to Himself God's dealings 
with men, there is no trace of it in the Gospels. 

Christian apologists write books to prove that God 
is good in spite of all appearances to the contrary. 
Christian philosophers try to make things simpler 
by telling us that the laws of nature are non-moral. 
Jesus calls on the forces of nature to witness that God 
is not only good but kind, kind far above our deserv- 
ing. Some find it hard to believe in God because the 
flood rots the crop of the pious farmer as well as of 
* Matt. 541. 
28 



Why are You Afraid Like This ? 

his immoral neighbour. "Look," says Jesus, " how 
good God is. The sun is God's sun ; yet He lets 
it shine on the bad man's field just as much as on the 
good man's. That is how God treats His enemies." 1 
The pessimist is grieved because in times of drought 
nature does not discriminate between the religious, 
farmer and the irreligious. " Look," says Jesus, 
" how kind God is. God sends rain as plentifully on 
the fields of the unjust farmer who fights against 
Him as of the just who is His friend." 1 Jesus knows 
about the sparrows that starve in the winter as well 
as of those that God feeds. He asks us to believe 
that the heart of God is as tender as our own. These 
little birds are sold in the bazaar at two for a half- 
penny, yet our Father is with each one of them 
when they die.* If the Father whom Jesus has 
revealed is with them, that is enough. 

We have one episode that lights up for us the mind 
of Jesus on this subject of the forces of nature that 
seem so often to be an independent power in the 
universe. One evening as Jesus and His disciples 
cross the sea of Galilee a storm arises. Winds are 
roaring, seas raging, the sailors' hearts failing them 
for fear. Jesus sleeps through it all, through the 
tumult and excitement and terror. Volumes could 
not expound more fully His philosophy of nature. 
The sleepers of Gospel story preach to us : Peter 
and James and John who slept while Judas was 
working and while Jesus would have had them pray; 
the five thoughtless servant girls who slept off their 
1 Matt. 545. a Matt. 1029. 

29 



Jesus and Life 

guard, unready for the awakening, as they waited 
for the bride and bridegroom. Even Jesus seldom 
preached a more effective sermon than when He 
slept through the storm. He knows that while He 
sleeps His Father watches. God is at the helm. 
The sailors' lives are in no jeopardy. He wonders 
that the disciples do not see this. In Mark's graphic 
account Jesus says to wind and sea, " Hush. 
Be muzzled." 1 But there is no indication that He 
felt safer or thought the disciples should feel safer 
after the storm ceased than before. 

Jesus rebuked them for their want of faith. What 
was the faith that He expected from them ? Surely 
not the belief that the boat in which He was could 
not sink. Jesus' difficulty was not to convince the 
disciples that He was immortal but to persuade them 
that His pathway lay through death. The " life " 
He promised them was not longevity of the body but 
vitality of the soul. But Jesus' work was not yet 
done. The education of the disciples was not yet 
complete. Until He can say " It is finished," it 
is true to say " no waters can swallow the ship " 
where He lies. To Jesus no language is too strong 
to convey His assurance of the unceasing loving 
control of His Father and ours in the humblest events 
of our daily lives. " As for you the hairs of your 
head are numbered, every one of them."* Every- 
thing that happens to Jesus, even the things that 
cause Him anguish, happen " as it is written ; " 
if not in Old Testament Scripture, written at least 

* Mark 439. » Matt. io3°. 

30 



Why are You Afraid Like This ? 

in the mind of God. We believe that God is light, 
on the whole. Until we can add that " darkness in 
Him there is none " we shall never see life as Jesus 
saw it or face life as He faced it. Not a soldier falls 
to the ground without our Father ; not a bullet or 
a shell finds its mark but God sees and knows and 
loves and lets it be so. Woe to them through whom 
these things happen, but they all happen " as it is 
written." 

Someone will say : There is no argument here ; 
this great Gospel rests on the simple word of Jesus ; 
we have still to settle the question who Jesus was. 
When He said to the first apostles " Follow Me," 
they rose and followed Him. ' Why they followed Him 
we do not know ; probably they themselves could 
not have told. There was that in Jesus that so 
wrought in them that when He said " Come" they 
could not help coming. And there is that in 
Jesus which so moves us that when He says to us 
" God is good," we know in our hearts that God is 
good. On any question within the range of the 
sciences we shall turn to our books and the teachers 
in the schools. On the big questions of life we go 
to the greatest personality we know. When we 
wish to know about God we go to the pure in heart. 

Is there no place for chance in the world as Jesus 
sees it ? Once a man had an unfortunate experience 
on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. As he lay 
on the road half-dead, "by chance" 1 a certain 
priest came down that road. The wounded traveller 

1 Luke io3*. 
31 



Jesus and Life 

did not know the priest ^v as coming. The priest 
did not know he would see the wounded traveller. 
But God knew. God had arranged the meeting. 
He was giving the priest an opportunity to do a 
kindness and incidentally to make himself immortal. 
Chance is our ignorance of God's arrangements. 



3* 



CHAPTER III 

Strangers, but not Pilgrims 

Jesus is sure that for the man whose life is in tune 
with the world there is nothing to be afraid of. 
But there are men in plenty whose lives are not 
in tune with the world ; and it is one of the paradoxes 
of Jesus' teaching that the men we call worldly are 
the men whose whole lives are a warfare against 
the very constitution of the world. The man who 
does not live his life in the spirit of Him through 
whom the world was made is a stranger on the face 
of the earth. The younger son of the parable 1 is 
commonly taken to represent the sensualist : and 
it would be a poor triumph of exegesis to rob the 
story of a meaning that has brought life and hope to 
countless weary wanderers. But the interpretation 
at least is narrow. If the story is a parable, why 
should we render so literally the swine, the pods, 
and the harlots ? It is a story of a son with an 
unfilial spirit, who was not at home in his father's 
house. He was interested only in himself — " Give 
me — " and in his own aggrandisement, his own rights 
as a son — " the share of the estate that is my due." 
He recognises no claim on him to be about his father's 
1 Luke i5"-3». 

33 

t 



Jesus and Life 

business; his father exists for him, not he for his 
father. For all who live their lives in this spirit, 
there is but one end : famine, friendlessness, and the 
swine trough. Be they publicans or Pharisees, 
gaol-birds or office bearers in a church, they have 
turned their back on their Father's house ; they are 
strangers in a strange land, and the world is against 
them. " Father, give me my share of the estate." 
" Father, I have sinned." One of the points of the 
story is the transformed accent of the word Father. 
The first "Father" is a word of rote; the son is a 
son according to the flesh, but he has not at heart 
the honour of the home. The second " Father " has a 
meaning on the son's lips it had never had before. 
He asks now not for property but for service, service 
in any capacity if only he be allowed to serve. 

What becomes of those sons of the Father who till 
the end refuse to think of themselves as children, 
who spend their lives demanding what life can give 
and have not the word "service" in all their vocabu- 
lary ? Is not this a serious state of matters ? The 
story of the elder brother has often been treated 
as if it were for all practical purposes a new parable. 
Surely this is to misread it. The younger son has 
had his gay time in the far country ; and when times 
change for the worse all he has to do is to make for 
home, where he will be received with open arms and 
every mark of distinction, with never a word of the 
shameful past. We do not find it so in life. The 
conversation between the father and the elder brother 
is not a superfluous addition to the story but a second 

34 



Strangers, but not Pilgrims 

and integral chapter. The elder brother wants to 
know, as we all want to know, whether after all the 
younger son has had the best of it. And the Father 
says, " No." The prodigal returns indeed, but he 
does not return as he went. His share of the paternal 
estate, youth, health, reputation, purity, all are gone; 
and he has a new inheritance of a load of bitter 
memories. Long weary years of patient uphill 
work wall not bring him back to a position quite like 
that which he destroyed in a few reckless months. 
What of the elder brother who all the time has 
chosen the quiet and often dreary path of duty and 
service ? " Son, you are with me all the time, 
and all that is mine is yours.' ' Is this the language 
of rebuke? And why the extravagant rejoicing 
over the son who came back from abroad ? For this 
reason, that when all hope had been given up, he has 
come back. Everything else has been lost, but he 
has saved his life ; and the Father's transports of 
joy are the measure of the difference betw r een life, shorn 
of everything but life, and the death in which he had 
pictured his son. This is Jesus' estimate of the 
perils of a chiJd of God refusing to think of himself 
as a child of God and trying to live a selfish and secular 
life in the Father's world. Many would simply re- 
fuse to acknowledge that selfishness is so tragic a 
business as all this. May it be that the measure 
in which we differ from Jesus here is the measure of 
our inability to judge ? The dead are fit for nothing 
but to bury their dead. They cannot tell who are 
living or what life is. 

35 



Jesus and Life 

The unfilial unbrotherly spirit may take many 
forms. Against which of them should we be most 
on our guard ? Here again Jesus is at variance with 
most of us. In our practical code the offences that 
count are those which place us in the criminal dock, 
or lead to social ostracism : theft and cheating, 
unless they are kept within well defined limits ; 
excess in drink, unless confined to appropriate places 
and seasons ; sexual irregularity beyond the bounds 
recognised by society. But Jesus found no more 
fruitful soil for His ministry than among the pro- 
fessional cheats and harlots of the time. And 
perhaps nothing in the whole Gospel story so brings 
home to us the need of searching our consciences 
as the realisation of the kind of things that did 
Jesus to death. The deliberate teaching of the 
Gospels is that when God incarnate enters the world 
there are classes of people whose sole relation to Him 
is one of unmeasured hostility, who will never rest 
till they have driven Him from the world. The 
sins that brought Jesus to the cross were not the 
things that shock us but sins that are compatible 
with a distinguished position in the world of philan- 
thropy and high office in the Church ; may we not 
even say, sins that flourish best in an ecclesiastical 
atmosphere ? If we are ever tempted to feel spirit- 
ually secure because our creed and our performance 
of Churchly duties are unimpeachable, it gives us 
pause to remember that it was the praying, temple- 
loving, Bible-reading, tithe-giving, Sabbath-keeping, 
ultra -orthodox representatives of a highly spiritual 

36 



Strangers, but not Pilgrims 

religion that stooped to bribery and treachery 
and did not scruple to invoke the aid of a political 
power they affected to hate and despise, in order 
to compass the death of Jesus Christ. 

Pilate had the instincts of a just judge, but he 
vacillated and may have had his own reasons 
for avoiding an unpopular course. Weakness and 
love of popularity are not always the venial things 
we think them. Judas was perhaps a disappointed 
politician and Herod a time-server. But the murder 
of Jesus was due primarily neither to Pilate nor to 
Judas nor to Herod but to the Pharisees. One out- 
standing lesson of the life of Jesus is that the spirit 
of religion has no greater enemy than a perverted 
devotion to the forms of religion. The evangelists 
have shown us with much elaboration the things 
in Jesus that roused Pharisaic antipathy. They 
expected and wanted a Messiah, but the only Messiah 
they would acknowledge would be a magnified 
Pharisee who would share all their prejudices and 
lead them to earthly glory. Jesus had no authority : 
He had no kind of ordination that they could recog- 
nise. He had disgraced their order : He not only 
preached to tax-gatherers and non-templegoers — 
there might be no great harm in that — but He had 
no sense of dignity and sat among them at their 
disreputable junketings. His provincial accent was 
only part of His general want of style. He insisted 
too on finding a meaning in religious ceremonies — 
always a dangerous innovation — and attached no 
importance to the ceremony except in so far as it 

37 



Jesus and Life 

had a meaning for Him. He cared nothing for the 
will to power, and was willing to sit down under the 
Roman yoke. Not only did He refuse to accept 
them at their own valuation, but He did not 
trouble even to find euphemisms for their greed 
and cruelty, their petty vanity and hypocrisy. 
He refused to believe that the past was neces- 
sarily wiser and more experienced than the present. 
In solving moral problems He would have them look 
rather to the spirit of the creative personalities 
of the past, "what David did" for example, than 
to the hair-splitting of lawyers or theological 
professors. 

We do not forget that the Church of bur day 
is a Christian Church and that the Church which 
crucified Jesus was a Jewish Church. Yet the 
" sinners " of Jesus' day were just the non-church- 
goers of our day. If those outside church circles 
are not being drawn to Him as the " sinners " were 
drawn to Him, may it be that they do not see Him 
as the " sinners " saw Him ? And if they do not, 
who is responsible ? If the spirit of the Pharisee 
is alive in Christendom, we may be certain that 
its results are no less paralysing to religion, no less 
hostile to Jesus, than they were in His day. If we 
would examine our own relation to this most 
insidious and destructive of all sins, the Gospel 
story suggests certain questions that we can ask our- 
selves. Are we fond of talking about our religious 
activities ? Jesus compared pious Jews striving 
to keep the law, to bullocks struggling and 

38 



Strangers, but not Pilgrims 

stumbling under a crushing load 1 : would 
this comparison be applicable to the ideal 
Christian . of our conception ? Do we claim 
pecuniary gain or social recognition on the strength 
of our religious profession ? In our self-examination 
do we ever adopt the method of comparing ourselves 
with others, and does the comparison ever lead to 
pride and contempt ? Have we lists of virtues on 
which we pride ourselves, and among these do we 
give a high place to fulfilment of the Church's claims 
on us ? Do we draw external and material distinctions 
between those inside the pale and those outside ? 
Could our religious life be fairly described as a full- 
dress parade ? Do we ever -take an unfair advantage 
of men's reverence for piety, and the fact that they 
can see only the outward signs of piety? When we 
pray or give or practise any kind of self-sacrifice do 
we shut the door or do we open the door ? Are we ever 
guilty of proselytising, trying rather to win converts 
to our tenets than to turn souls from darkness to 
Jesus ? Are we convinced that outside of our order 
God has few favourites ? 

Jesus died a victim to sin, to many sins, to all 
sin ; but pre-eminently and in the first place to the 
Pharisaic type of mind. This is the answer to the 
broad-mindedness that assures us we are all seeking 
the same end by different roads. The Pharisees 
of our day do not put their victims on crosses, 
not on wooden crosses at least ; but is the spirit 
essentially different ? 

1 Matt. 11*8. 
39 



CHAPTER TV 

The Strain of Christianity 

Jesus vehemently denounced Pharisees as a 
class ; seldom, so far as our records go, the individual 
Pharisee. In the Gospel story we learn, as we learn 
in life, to distinguish between a system and the indi- 
viduals in whom it is embodied. It is natural that 
men who have been brought up in the atmosphere 
of traditionalism and ceremonialism should be- 
come traditionalists : natural but not inevitable. 
The fault of the individual Pharisee is just that 
he does not rise above his environment. We are 
sometimes told that morality consists in the formation 
of good habits. But we must be sure that they are 
good habits. In Jesus' view conventionality is the 
deadly foe of goodness. Some measure of origin- 
ality is essential to salvation. And here again Jesus 
runs counter to all our preconceived opinions in 
the place He gives to mere want of thought among 
instruments of destruction. 

The road that leads to disaster is so obvious, so 
inviting, so well advertised, so extensively patron- 
ised by people who ought to know, that some have 
gone a long way on the broad road almost before they 
know there is an alternative pathway. The decisions 

40 



The Strain of Christianity 

that lead to life or to destruction seem often such 
trivial matters. Here are five girls waiting to take 
their place in a bridal procession. 1 The bride and bride- 
groom are delayed and the five go to sleep. No 
doubt it was very foolish of them. They ought to 
have foreseen the possibility of delay, and either, 
have blown out their lamps or gone for more oil. 
But as they lay down heedlessly, no thought was 
farther from their minds than that they were 
making a choice between presence at and absence 
from the wedding festivities. As Dives 3 went out 
for his morning walk, no doubt he should sometimes 
have said a kind word to Lazarus or ordered a meal 
for him from the kitchen. *At least he did Lazarus 
no harm ; probably he thought of him as an institu- 
tion or as part of the landscape. But that this heed- 
lessness should make all the difference between 
Abraham's bosom and the tortures of Hades, this is 
what arrests us. 

Individual Pharisees lived according to their 
light and the standard expected from them by their 
society ; but in their case we know where acceptance 
of the current code was leading them. Life cor- 
roborates the teaching of Jesus that want of moral 
insight is not the venial thing we think it. If only 
evil were altogether and manifestly evil ! Why, 
we ask, should wisdom and even experience be 
necessary to penetrate its disguises ? But there 
is an insight that comes neither of wisdom nor 
experience. The pure in heart shall see God, and 

« Matt. 25 I -*3. * Luke i6 x 9-3i. 

4* 



Jesus and Life 

they shall be quick to know Satan too, though he 
come as he came to Jesus with Scripture texts on 
his lips. Jesus came to open the eyes of the blind. 
The Pharisee looked at the tax-gatherer and saw a 
disloyal cheat ; at the woman of the city and saw 
a harlot ; at the coin the widow dropped into the 
treasury and saw a farthing. He looked at Jesus 
and saw an agent of Beelzebub. But the men and 
women who were in close touch with Jesus were 
learning to look at life with the eyes of God. 

Life as Jesus saw it was a serious business, to be 
taken lightly at our peril ; and so we find throughout 
the Gospels an atmosphere of earnestness, of eager 
haste. The young man running* to Jesus to ask Him 
how to get eternal life is an emblematic figure. Shep- 
herds hasten to Bethlehem to see the new-born 
Messiah.* The thousands whom Jesus fed had 
reached the spot running.3 After the miracle when 
Jesus reached Gennesaret there was strenuous haste 
through a whole district as the people brought their 
sick friends to Jesus. 4 Zacchaeus runs on in 
front of the crowd and climbs a tree to get a 
glimpse of Jesus5 ; and on the resurrection morning 
there is much running to and fro — Mary running to 
tell Peter and the other disciples of the empty tomb, 
Peter and the other running to the tomb to see for 
themselves. 6 

Jesus loved the runners of the Gospel story ; and 
He loved too men and women of grit and determina- 

i Mark io»7. 2 Luke 2 16 . 3 Mark 633. 

4 Mark 655. 5 Luke 194. 6 John 20 2 »4. 

42 



The Strain of Christianity 

tion, people who knew exactly what they wanted 
and would let no obstacle stand in their way. The 
four men who brought their paralysed friend to 
Jesus only to find that the house where He was 
was crowded to the door, and who, instead of turning 
back as weaker men would have done, said at once : — 
" Well, if we cannot get in by the door we will get 
in by the roof;" 1 Bartimaeus who would not 
be quiet, and who when at last Jesus called him, 
threw off his cloak and sprang up and went to Jesus 
with his magnificent demand, 3 the Syro-phoenician 
who in her love for her suffering child would take 
no refusal however apparently contemptuous, but 
with no thought of her own feelings used her woman's 
wit and clung to her hope3 : these were dear to the 
heart of Jesus. Were they not dear to Him just be- 
cause they were men and women after His own heart ? 
Jesus could not have conquered without this same 
grim determination and unshakeable faith. He would 
not let the rich young ruler call Him good.4 For in 
the world His goodness was goodness militant. His 
temptations, unlike His disciples, continued with 
Him till the end. 

Not only earnestness but even recklessness always 
made its appeal to Jesus. When the woman at 
Bethany broke the flask of costly ointment and 
poured it over His head. 5 the economical disciples, 
whose hard life had taught them how much can be 
done with fifteen pounds, grumbled, and were quite 

1 Mark 23. » Mark io4«-5°. 3 Mark 7M-30. 

4 Mark 10 18 . 5 Mark 143-9. 

43 



Jesus and Life 

sure that Jesus was with them in their protest. 
But Jesus always does the surprising thing ; He 
approved the extravagance. The woman was 
anointing Him for His burial, not; as the disciples 
thought, with her ointment but with her love. To 
stop the outflow of such generous devotion would be 
to inflict a wrong on her, a wrong on Himself, that 
no amount of mechanical kindness to the perennial 
poor would ever outweigh. 

Jesus is fond of the word all, — giving all, leaving 
all. There is a splendid abandon about the heroes 
and heroines of Gospel story. The pearl merchant 
who thought it a good bargain to sell every pearl he 
had to buy one, 1 the farm labourer who sold all his 
worldy possessions to buy the field with the hid 
treasure,* the widow who threw her last half- 
penny into the temple treasury, these are not the 
people we would send out as leaders of a thrift cam- 
paign. The cautious servant who took such good 
care of his one talent did not find his master grateful 
for his refusal to take risks. 3 Prudence, a wise econ- 
omy in the use of money, may be a virtue ; it is a 
virtue to which Jesus did not think it necessary to 
call attention, though He said so much about money. 
He placed the spendthrift instinct high among 
the Christian graces ; but the extravagance of the 
Christian prodigal is never an extravagance of self- 
indulgence, always of selfless love and devotion. 

These men and women were convinced that their 
sacrifices, their giving and their selling, reckless as 

1 Matt. 1345.46. * Matt. 1344. 3 Matt. 25^. 

44 



The Strain of Christianity 

they seemed, were only a great venture of faith, 
or rather they were not a venture at all ; they were 
certainties of faith. What they did was worth 
while. It is with hesitation we use the word 
" reward " in connection with Christian conduct. 
Have not our moralists told us that to be good for 
the sake of reward is but to be " other-worldly/' 
which is hardly an advance on being "this- worldly." 
This is very clever ; but if we err in doubting its 
truth, we err in good company. Not once but 
again and again throughout the New Testament, 
not least on the lips of our Lord, do we find this 
thought that the good life is also the wise life — if you 
like, even the prudent life. 

Jesus promised the rich ruler " treasure in heaven " 
in return for the earthly treasure he was invited to 
abandon. 1 What is this treasure in heaven ? Is 
it not simply spiritual treasure, the joy of sacrifice 
and service, of a talent worthily used, of the gratitude 
of the poor, of humility and kindliness supplanting 
arrogance and selfishness ? This joy none can take 
from us. Those who have been separated from 
their family for Jesus' sake, He has assured of entrance 
into a larger family, the bond among whom is de- 
votion to Himself.* Is this an appeal to an unworthy 
instinct ? Paul's reward for preaching to the Cor- 
inthians free of charge was that he could " refrain 
from insisting on all " his " rights as a preacher 
of the Gospel. "3 James tells us that the reward 

1 Mark io* 1 . * Mark 10*9*. 

3 1 Cor. 9 18 . Dr. Moffatt's translation. 

45 



Jesus and Life 

for turning back a wanderer is the consciousness 
that one has saved a soul from death and covered 
a multitude of sins. 1 That is why we are not 
afraid to speak of rewards. None but pure heroic 
souls feel the spell of the Gospel prizes. When men 
tell us that we should do the right just because it 
is right and " in the scorn of consequence," the 
answer is that there is no such thing as doing right 
in the scorn of consequence. The web of life is shot 
through and through with the justice of God. 
Right will bring its consequences, to ignore which is 
not superior morality but lack of insight. When 
Jesus assures us that goodness is profitable, His 
meaning is that the world is built on Christian lines ; 
and if we do the will of God as revealed in Jesus, 
we are in unison with the world which ultimately is 
on our side. 

Since Jesus reckons life a business of deadly earnest 
in which the issues are life and death and multitudes 
miss the way, we do not expect to find much of the 
lighter side of life in the Gospel story. There is no 
tale of human love in the Gospels, though there is 
one story of lust. Of home life there is hardly a 
glimpse. Is there humour in the Gospels ? Some 
would have us see Jesus walking through Palestine 
with a smile on His face always ready with a kindly 
jest to hide His more serious meaning. Let those 
read the Gospels in this way who can. It may be 
that our Lord's reference to the coin in the mouth 
of the fish* is a playful way of suggesting to Peter that 
1 James 5*9*. 2 Matt. 17*1. 

46 



The Strain of Christianity 

the attitude of passive resistance to the temple-tax 
is hardly worth while, since it is so easy to raise 
the amount by catching and selling a fish. When 
He reminded the Syro-phoenician woman that it was 
not proper to throw the children's bread to the dogs, 1 
His expression of countenance may have made it 
clear that He was playfully adopting the bitter 
phrase which repelled Him as much as it repelled 
her. 

We do not expect to find much gaiety in the 
humour of the Gospels, and perhaps more characteristic 
is the grim jest about the camel and the needle's 
eye. If the camel is ever to get through the needle's 
eye, it must somehow get rid of its hump, and if the 
rich man is to get through the door of the Kingdom 
of God he must somehow get rid of the hump on his 
back.* It is congruent with the whole story that 
when we come to the richest piece of humour in the 
Gospels Jesus is not the author but the victim. 
" They struck Him, saying : — ' Prophesy for us, 
Messiah. Which of us was it that struck you ? "3 
"They took off His clothes and dressed Him in a 
scarlet cloak ; then they plaited a garland of thorns 
and put it on His head and a reed in His right hand ; 
then they knelt in front of Him and made fun of 
Him by saying : " All hail ! King of the Jews."4 
Throughout the whole story of the trial and the cruci- 
fixion we hear the laughter of Him whose throne is 
in heaven, as each new indignity becomes another 
jewel for His crown. 

1 Mark 7»7. * Mark io»5. 3 Matt. 26 6 7*. 4 Matt. 27 *8 ff . 

47 



CHAPTER V 
Jesus the Teacher 

Critics of Christianity are always quite clear 
what they mean by Christianity ; yet the codes of 
conduct that have been accepted in the Christian 
Church have varied widely enough to call for an 
explanation. It is not only on questions of detail 
that Christians differ. There has not been unvary- 
ing consistency in the attitude of the Church towards 
big moral questions that face whole nations, questions 
of war and slavery, for example ; or even on the 
moral ends towards which the Christian life is to be 
directed. Is Christianity to find its centre of gravity 
in the world beyond the grave, or are its main efforts 
to be directed towards the transformation of this 
life ? Are we to judge our success in the Christian 
life by the extent to which we succeed in crushing 
our natural human desires, or by the measure in 
which we succeed with a good conscience in satisfying 
them ? Is the religion of Jesus concerned mainly 
with the welfare of the individual soul or is its main 
interest the rebuilding of society on Christian lines ? 
Are we- to forgive all our enemies or only some of 
them ; is our forgiveness to be absolute or conditional ; 
and what is meant by forgiving enemies ? These 

48 



Jesus the Teacher 

are not questions of academic interest, yet on none of 
them has the Church given unambiguous testimony. 

Is Christianity a purely spiritual religion to which 
the Hindu idea of ceremonial defilementis abhorrent? 
Are we to accept the teaching of Jesus that there is no 
uncleanness in religion but uncleanness of the mind 
and heart? If so, then the Lord's table can be 
defiled only by the participation of guests who have 
no sympathy with the' will of Jesus. A Christian 
temple can never be desecrated by an officiating 
priest who loves the Lord, whatever his ecclesias- 
tical antecedents. The sleeping-place of our 
Christian dead, if it is not contaminated by the 
mortal remains of a sensualist whose credentials 
are satisfactory, will not be defiled by sheltering the 
ashes of a follower of Jesus even if, like his Master, 
he worshipped God in unconventional ways and 
among unconventional people. Yet every one of 
these positions would be strenuously resisted by 
many Christians who do not call themselves Roman 
Catholics. 

Either then Christianity is not the rigid scheme 
of life we had tended to conceive it, or if there 
is only one kind of life that can lawfully claim to be 
Christian, there are difficulties in discovering of what 
nature it is. In both these explanations there is 
a measure of truth. The garments even of the 
worthy guests at the wedding feast are not all cut 
in the same pattern. But we are chiefly concerned 
at present with the other point, that to find the mind 
of Christ is more difficult than we commonly allow. 

49 

4 



Jesus and Life 

There are first certain difficulties connected with 
the material at our disposal. The formal teaching in 
which we are reasonably sure that we have the words of 
Jesus comprises a somewhat small proportion of the 
New Testament writings ; and, apart from the 
parables, what teaching there is perhaps more 
often takes the form of occasional utterances 
than of systematic instruction. Again we seldom 
know with any certainty the original context 
of the sayings of Jesus. Moreover the teaching 
of Jesus, and indeed all the records of Jesus' life as 
we have them, are the result of a double process of 
sifting : first by the early Church, largely guided 
no doubt by her own needs ; and secondly by the 
men who committed to writing such of the original 
traditions as had thus survived. One great difficulty 
in reading the Gospels is the extreme conciseness 
and restraint with which most of the stories are told, 
the general absence of comment and the avoidance 
of discussion of motive. 

In all teaching the pupil has his part to play 
as well as the teacher. If men could be blind and 
deaf to Jesus in the synagogues of Galilee or the 
Temple at Jerusalem, it is still possible to see Him 
without perceiving and hear Him without under- 
standing. Men have searched the Scriptures, searched 
even the records of the four evangelists, not that they 
might find Jesus, but that they might find proof- 
texts for theological dogmas, support for political 
or ecclesiastical systems, justification for their views 
on property. Even when our approach to Jesus is 

50 



Jesus the Teacher 

more honest, we tend to leave the interpretation of 
the Gospels largely to scholars; but the apostles, 
like their Master, were men of action. Jesus gave 
them instruction in periods of retirement, but their 
" practising school " was the school of life, of public 
life, in which vehement and virulent passions played 
a large part, in which after the first happy days 
there were murmurs, .ever deepening in intensity, 
of anger and hatred and malice ; while running 
through the last days was the trail of treachery 
and of blood. Can a student sitting snugly among 
his books hope to tell us all that is in it ? 

We are at present however chiefly concerned 
with the originality of Jesus' teaching methods. 
We make no progress in understanding the mind of 
Jesus till we realise that He never intended to be 
a second Moses. We rail at the Pharisees ; but 
Pharisaism, like all other powerful human institu- 
tions, derives its strength from the extent to which 
it answers a universal human instinct. We all like 
to have our moral problems solved for us. When 
faced with some difficult ethical question, it is so 
much easier to turn up a passage in a book or go to 
a priest than to think it out for ourselves and accept 
the responsibility. Jesus came, not to give new laws, 
but to inspire us with a new spirit, but we find it 
hard to take this in. When we have to make up 
our minds on questions of war or peace, divorce, 
Sabbath-keeping, the relation of the Christian to 
the State or to the law-courts, we read the Gospel to 
find out what legislation Jesus has given on these 

5* 



Jesus and Life 

matters. But if the truth is that Jesus had no idea 
of giving any legislation on these or any other 
matters, we cannot tre surprised if those who will 
have it that the Gospels are a new law book differ 
as to what they find there. 

Jesus' name for Himself, the " Light of the World," 
describes exactly His conception of Himself as a 
moral legislator. He illumines for us the world, 
its people, things, and institutions ; and by lighting 
them up and revealing them to us as they are, He 
illumines our duty towards them. He teaches by 
giving insight. We do not see the angry man in his 
true nature till we see the murderer he sometimes 
becomes. 1 Murder is not always involved in 
malicious anger, but it is always implicit in it. The 
use of oaths involves a double standard of truth*. 
The very existence of a system of oaths is an impres- 
sive commentary on the prevalent standard of 
veracity. Jesus invites us to bring our conversational 
standard up to our oath standard, so that oaths 
will be no longer necessary. Literalists may if they 
choose refuse to take oaths in a court of law, pro- 
vided they understand that that is not what Jesus 
meant. The lustful act is not self-contained.3 It 
is the end of a process which begins with the lustful 
look. The defilement of the act is inherent in every 
stage of the process from the beginning. 

This is Jesus' method all through. He did not 

prohibit His followers from joining in the Temple 

worship. It was only in the course of experience 

* Matt. 5"*. * Matt. 53jff I Matt. 5*7*. 

52 



Jesus the Teacher 

that they gradually found the Temple worship 
incompatible with Christian worship. So far as we 
know, Jesus did not explicitly abolish the system of 
sacrifices. It was not He who turned the Jewish 
Sabbath into the Christian Sabbath. His sole 
legislation about the Sabbath day consisted in 
reminding us of the meaning of the Sabbath : it 
is the day of which the Son of man is Lord, 1 a day for 
doing good, 2 a day which is meant to be not a bringer 
of burdens but a lightener of burdens. 3 He abolishes 
the absurd confusion between physical and moral 
defilement by pointing out the obvious fact, easily 
forgotten like so many other obvious facts, that the 
seat of moral defilement is in the will, neither in the 
stomach nor in the skin. 4 Even if we could succeed 
in wresting some of the words of Jesus into a system 
of legislation, we are investing Him with a function 
with which He never invested Himself. Any method 
of using the Gospels which tends to make the Christian 
life consist in blind adherence to mechanical rules 
is contrary to the whole spirit and purpose of the 
teaching of Jesus. 

Not only does Jesus consistently refuse to sit in 
Moses' seat. One of the surprises of the Gospels 
is the way in which He abstains from moral comments 
in circumstances which seem to call for them. As 
He tells the story of the unmerciful creditor, 5 He 
makes no criticism of the system which first enabled 
a money-lender to charge usurious interest and then 

1 Mark 2 a8 . 2 Luke 69. 3 Luke I3 x 5 ff . 

4 Mark 7*5. 5 Matt. i8»«ff 

53 



Jesus and Life 

delivered bodily into his hands the insolvent debtor 
and all his family. But here as always Jesus is 
intolerant of dullness. He has no need to tell us 
that His soul is aflame with indignation at the whole 
system of usury and all its concomitants ; but that 
is notHis point at the time and He will not be turned 
from His point. His picture of the king contem- 
plating war 1 gives no hint of His attitude to war, 
any more than the introduction of the fatted calf in 
the story of the prodigal is a point against the 
vegetarians. 

Is this an ineffective method of teaching ? Is it 
possible for any compelling Christian sentiment to 
arise on subjects on which Jesus made no definite 
pronouncement, and on which we are left to the 
accuracy of our insight into His mind ? For answer 
we point to the facts that though Jesus said no word 
on slavery, yet Christianity has abolished slavery 
from its dominions ; that in the Gospels there is 
only one reference to the treatment of prisoners in 
gaols, yet the spirit of Jesus has transformed our 
whole method of dealing with crime and will transform 
it still further ; that the present gradual and even 
rapid recognition of the true place of woman in the 
home, the Church, and the State, is but a tardy 
awakening to Jesus' conception of her. 

Like all true teachers Jesus worked largely in the 
concrete. He dealt thus and thus with this one 
and with that one, and as we watch Him, we know 
that we see the working of principles, eternal and 

1 Luke 14H. 
54 



Jesus the Teacher 

universal. But just because we see these principles 
as applied to individual people with their own char- 
acters and their own circumstances, characters and 
circumstances which for the most part are unknown 
to us, often we are not quite sure that we grasp the 
point. The rich ruler was told to sell all that he 
had and give the proceeds to the poor. 1 Does this 
command apply to all ? Or only to those who are 
called to be apostles ? Or to all rich people ? Or 
only to this particular rich man in his peculiar 
circumstances. 

Of one thing we may be sure : Jesus' sayings to 
individuals are never dictated simply by the emotion 
of the moment. The eternal principle is always 
there, can we but find it. " To-day shalt thou be 
with me in Paradise "* is no mere outburst of grati- 
tude. For the thief has made confession of his 
guilt : " We indeed justly." He has acknowledged 
that Jesus is suffering for no sins of His own : " He 
has done nothing amiss." This tribute to Jesus 
wrung from the agonies of the dying criminal was 
not expressed as Church councils expressed it later. 
Was it less convincing ? In the hour of Jesus' 
weakness, pain, and shame, the hour when He 
looked less like an earthly king than He had ever 
looked before, the darkened soul of the outcast saw 
the crown on Jesus' brow that was hid from all else, 
and he died with a prayer to the King : — " Jesus, 
remember me when you come in your Kingdom." 
He had passed his confirmation test. 

1 Mark io«. * Luke 234s. 

55 



Jesus and Life 

Our Lord again frequently adopted a device with 
which all teachers are familiar, of giving in an absolute 
way a principle or a command which is not abso- 
lutely applicable, leaving to a later stage in the 
development of the pupils explanation of the limit- 
ations and conditions. Thus He says quite simply : 
— " Ask, and it shall be given you." 1 That is by no 
means the whole of His teaching of prayer ; it is by no 
means all that the mature Christian requires to know 
about prayer. Apart from intelligent conceptions 
of what is meant both by asking and receiving, 
a literal acceptance of the words of Jesus will lead 
to much cisappointment. But the principle as He 
gives it is the essential fact round which all our 
thoughts on the subject of prayer must centre. 
God wants to answer prayer ; God is able to answer 
prayer ; God does answer prayer ; when our prayers 
seem not to be answered the reason never is that God 
is unable or unwilling to help us. 

Nor is Jesus always careful to remind us how each 
principle He enunciates does not abrogate the others. 
" Selling all that we have and giving to the poor " 
must somehow be made compatible with the dis- 
charge of our family and our other social obliga- 
tions. "Loving our enemies" does not absolve 
us from the duty of protecting women from 
insult or children from pain. But Jesus does not 
explain all this in so many words. He came to 
save our minds as well as our bodies and our souls. 
If we refuse to think we shall never see life as He 

* Matt. 77. 
56 



Jesus the Teacher 

meant us to see it. Jesus makes magnificent demands 
from us, all our allegiance, the consecration of every 
organ of our bodies, all our possessions. Why should 
we resent it so much if He expects us to use our 
brains in dealing with His teaching ? If God has 
given us ears to hear, shall we not use them ? 

When we try to look out on the world with the eyes 
of Jesus, do we not tend to rely too exclusively on 
His mere words ? With any religious teacher, 
how much more with Jesus, it is not the words 
that impress us but the # personality behind the 
words. The sayings of Jesus are often best taken as 
a commentary on His life. We forget at times how 
many of His utterances, on -the breaking of family 
ties, the gaining of the world at the expense of the 
soul, the blessedness of persecution, the treatment 
of enemies, hospitality to the poor, were spoken out 
of the fullness of His own experience. The school 
that Mark represents, the school that concentrated 
on the life, was not depreciating Jesus as a teacher. 
Even if we had no record of His formal teaching, 
Jesus taught as He healed the people and supplied 
their physical needs ; He taught as He lay silent 
while the woman of the city kissed His feet and 
anointed them, 1 as He stooped and wrote on the 
ground in presence of the adulteress and her ac- 
cusers. * He taught as He wept over Jerusalem,3 as He 
agonised in the Garden ;4 He taught too as He stood 
silent before His judges, as He bore the mocking and 
the scourging, the pain and shame of the cross. 

1 Luke 738*. a John 8*. 8 Luke 1941. 4 Luke 2244. 

57 



CHAPTER VI 
Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

One of Jesus' instructional methods is so much 
of the essence of His teaching, is so manifestly bound 
up with His whole conception of the mutual re- 
lations of God, man, and nature, that it merits 
separate notice. Readers of the Gospels have not 
always realised the part played in them by figurative 
language. The point is not that Jesus. used such 
language, but that He used it constantly and in all 
kinds of connections. It was His favourite teaching 
instrument. 

The accounts of the Temptation which presumably 
came from Jesus are all given in pictorial form. 
The point of one of them was the temptation to put 
a literal interpretation on a poetic idea in the ninety- 
first Psalm. 1 Jesus' defence against the early attacks 
of the scribes and Pharisees is all expressed in figures. 
" Healthy people do not need a doctor, but only 
sick people."* "The friends at the wedding feast 
cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them."3 
" No one sews a piece of undressed cloth on to an old 
garment. "4 " No one pours new wine into old 
skins, "5 

1 vv. ii, 12. cf. Matt. 4 6 . a See Mark 2 X 7. 

See Mark 2 X 9. 4 Mark 2". S Mark 2". 

58 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

The sacrifices required of His adherents are ex- 
pressed in metaphors : the tearing out of a right 
eye, 1 the cutting oft of a right hand. 3 The alter- 
native to entering into life is to go into Gehenna, 
the unquenchable fire. 3 At least two of the three 
candidates for discipleship at the end of the ninth 
chapter of Luke are dealt with in figures of speech. 
" Leave the dead to bury their own dead." " No 
man who looks behind with his hand on the plough is 
fit for the Kingdom. " The " Sermon on the Mount " 
abounds in figures. Jesus' experiences in His last 
hours are a cup which He has to drink. 4 His death 
in its aspect as His entrance on a glorified life is a 
baptism. 4 

Jesus taught not only by figurative language but 
also by figurative deeds ; for example, in His baptism, 
in the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, at the feeding 
of the five thousand, in the feet-washing scene, and 
especially at the Last Supper. In the fourth Gospel 
the miracles are "signs/' and throughout the Gospel 
one of the leading motives is the use of pictorial 
language to describe the personality of Jesus, the 
Life He has come to give, and His relation to His 
disciples ; and the misunderstandings to which this 
language leads. 

Jesus also did not disdain the use of irony. " I 
have not come to call just men."5 " Who has little 
forgiveness shows little love." 6 The publican went 

1 Matt. 529. * Matt. 530. 3 Mark 943. 

4 Mark 1038. 5 Mark 2*7. 6 See Luke 747. 

59 



Jesus and Life 

home accepted rather than fe the other man who had 
not even asked to be accepted. 1 He urges the 
Scribes and Pharisees not to come short of the guilt 
of their fathers, a piece of irony which has apparently 
been too much for the transcribers of the manuscript 
since they have been at pains to alter it.* At the 
end of the parable of the dishonest factor Jesus 
tells the disciples in their own interests to make 
friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness ; 
which advice, instead of being altered by shocked 
scribes and commentators, has had the more unfor- 
tunate fate of being taken literally.3 

We have seen also how fond Jesus was of hyperbole, 
that exaggerated form of speech in which we put 
a point very strongly in order to bring out our essential 
meaning. " If anybody slaps you on the right 
cheek, hold up your other cheek to him too. If a 
man makes a claim on your undergarment, hand him 
over your outer garment as well. If you have to give 
forced service for one mile, give voluntary service 
for another mile. Give to every beggar. Never 
turn your back on a borrower." 4 

Again and again Jesus' audience and even the 
disciples misunderstood Him. When on the last 
night Jesus told His disciples that any one who had 
no sword must sell his cloak and buy one, 5 we are not 
surprised to find the disciples examining their 
resources and producing two swords. It was the most 
pardonable of all their misunderstandings. But Jesus 

Luke i8 r 4. * Matt. 2333. See Dr. McNeile's Commentary. 

3 Luke 169. 4 See Matt. 539-4*. 3 Luke 223*. 

60 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

will not explain. He was being done to death by 
men whose religion was a round of ceremonies which 
had long ceased to have any meaning. The followers 
of Jesus must learn to think, learn the meaning 
of all the symbols they use, and of the word-symbols 
their Master uses. 

The Gospels make much of the dullness of the 
disciples ; so much that some have told us it is 
overdone ; that if Jesus ever had made the announce- 
ments the Gospels record of His death and resur- 
rection the disciples could not have misunderstood. 
Could they not ? The way in which we persist in 
thinking that we are honouring Jesus when we turn 
His poetry into prose, and the monstrous conceptions 
of God and Jesus and human life that have in 
consequence been entertained by whole generations, 
should lead us to be very wary in fixing limits to the 
dullness of disciples. Listen to this even from 
Goldwin Smith :— " Christendom has had practically 
to qualify the teachings of its founder and treat them 
at most as correctives of inordinate devotion to 
gold."* 

Christian servants have sometimes thought loyalty 
to Jesus involved the refusal to call their masters 
by the only name that described the relationship. 2 
Others have found in the Sermon on the Mount a 
rule forbidding Christians to act as magistrates. 3 
Nor must we think of these as trivial faults, much 
less as virtues ; for in finding in Scripture lessons 

1 " The Founder of Christendom," p. 22. 

» Matt. 23™. 3 Matt. 7*. 

6l 



Jesus and Life 

which are not there, we fail to find the much more 
important lessons which are there. To the last 
Jesus claimed the right to speak in His own way. 
The effective charge against Him was that He claimed 
to be King of the Jews. 1 The meaning the phrase 
would have in the records of Pilate's court was not 
the meaning it had in the mind of Jesus ; yet He would 
not alter it. It was the title that described His place 
in the history of God's chosen people and of mankind. 
Nor did Jesus " die for a metaphor." The soldiers 
who made sport of His title might misunderstand : 
neither the Pharisees, nor Pilate, nor Herod mis- 
understood. Jesus died, not because He claimed to be, 
but because He was, King of the Jews. 

But by far the most striking illustration of Jesus' 
pictorial methods of teaching is His use of the parable. 
The disciples asked an explanation of His adoption 
of this form of teaching, but it may well be that 
their question covered our Lord's whole use of 
figurative language. In Matthew's account Jesus 
gives the answer we expect, that He used concrete 
illustrations because the people do not understand 
abstract teaching.* But in Mark,3 followed by Luke,4 
Jesus is represented as saying that He employs 
the parable method to prevent people catching His 
meaning ; while in all three accounts the suggestion 
is made that there is an inner circle, a Freemasonry 
of enlightened disciples, and an outer circle to whom 
much or perhaps everything is dark. 

The passage is at first sight somewhat perplexing ; 

i Mark 1526. * Matt. 13™$. 3 Mark 4 I0 ff 4 Luke. 8?*. 

62 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

nor is much light shed on it by the reference of the 
commentators to the " judicial blindness " which 
is the penalty of a worldly life hostile to spiritual 
influences. Even this pious phrase cannot reconcile 
us to the picture of Jesus deliberately excogitating 
forms of expression which would conceal His meaning 
from the major part of His audience. This would 
indeed be putting the lamp under the flour measure 
or under the bed ; a thing which people do not do, 
as Jesus reminds us in a saying quoted in the same 
chapter of Mark. 1 

Yet we must not assume that the tradition followed 
by Mark and Luke had no basis in fact. Jesus 
explains His use of the parabolic method in words 
taken from the story of the call of Isaiah * — one of 
the Old Testament passages most frequently quoted 
in the New. Isaiah looking back recalls that his 
message has met with so poor a response that it 
almost seems as if the very object of his call had 
been to make the people less spiritual and more 
hard-hearted than they were before. Our Lord 
with a similar experience perhaps behind Him 
may well have repeated the words in the same 
spirit of sorrowful irony. 

His object in His parable teaching as in all His 
teaching was ultimately to reveal truth, never to 
conceal. Yet He knew that much that He said 
would be unintelligible to the bulk of His hearers 
at the time. There was an inner circle and there 
was an outer circle, or rather there were many 

1 Mark. 4* 1 . » Isaiah 69*. 

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Jesus and Life 

circles with varying degrees of enlightenment ; but 
the principle of grading was simply spiritual oppor- 
tunity and receptiveness. The disciples had private 
instruction that was not open to the crowd. In 
some cases we know they were specially asked to 
conceal till the time was ripe for publication, truths 
that had been revealed to them ; such as the Messiah- 
ship of Jesus 1 and the story of the Transfiguration 
with all that it involved. * 

Much of the instruction given in the parables 
would be of far more interest to the leaders of the 
Christian band than to the ordinary members of the 
Church. This is true for example of the Sower3 
which rebukes despondence and gives guidance as 
to evangelistic methods ; of the Tares, 4 which shows 
how to deal with interlopers in the Church ; and of 
the Mustard Seed, designed to give comfort in the 
day of small things. 5 Much, too, of the instruction 
that Jesus gave, even to the disciples, consisted not 
so much of trees of knowledge as of germ truths, 
which in the nature of the case could only gradually 
come to maturity. May we not indeed say of the 
parable collection as a whole, that it is not so much 
a mine which we may exhaust in course of time, as 
a river which has new refreshment for each new 
seeker in each succeeding age ? 

What has as a matter of fact been the effect of 
our Lord's use of the figurative method of teaching ? 
The great parables such as the Prodigal Son 6 and the 

i Mark 83°. 2 Mark 99. 3 Mark 43^. 

4 Matt. I3*4ff. 5 Mark 430^. 6 Luke i5 Ilff . 

64 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

Good Samaritan 1 have for ever lit up for us the 
loving face of God, and the heart of the man that 
is to be when the spirit of Jesus has accomplished 
its long work. Even in their case it may well be 
that exegesis has by no means said its last word : 
and who will tell us for certain the meaning of the 
wedding garment^ or of the story of the Dishonest 
Factor ?3 The endless discussions of what Jesus 
meant by the M Son of Man " or the " Kingdom of 
God " suggest that at times He may have had other 
objects in using figures than immediate illumination. 
Is it that human language is too dull an instrument 
to express the truth of God ; or is it that Jesus would 
have His words stand for all-time challenging us to 
watch, to remain awake, to search and search the 
infinite depth that is in them ? 

Jesus used the parable method with the freedom 
with which He made us free in every department 
of our lives. Misdirected industry and ingenuity 
in the service of that deadly literalness which is 
as hostile to Jesus to-day as it was in the days of 
His flesh, have tried to rob of beauty and of meaning 
even the parables, by the assumption that every 
character and every incident must have their spiritual 
counterpart. At the opposite extreme are those 
who gravely inform us that Jesus must not use 
allegory and that each parable can have only one 
lesson. One can imagine the surprise with which 
Jesus would have heard that He who came to deliver 
men from all kinds of bondage was to be bound by 
1 Luke io3off 2 Matt. 22 Ilf . 3 Luke i6 lff . 

65 

6 



Jesus and Life 

laws devised by grammarians in distant ages. He 
used the parable as seemed to Him best. 

Jesus' love of the parable is one more proof that 
the world, all the world, is to Him God's world. 
The chirping birds, the waving grass, the green 
shoot as ft peeps above the earth, all speak to Him 
of God. The wedding procession, the pearl 
merchant on his journeys, the fisherman sorting his 
fish, all are preaching sermons. To Jesus the whole 
earth is full of the glory of God. The same God who 
works in the heart of man works in the growing corn 
and in the baker's leaven. The same problem of 
different degrees of worth and worthlessness that 
face us in human character meets us also in the 
farmer's fields and in the fisherman's nets. As has 
been said : There is spiritual law in the natural 
world. 

We sometimes picture Jesus with some lesson 
that He wishes to teach looking round for an apt 
illustration. Is it not more natural to suppose that 
for the most part the illustration came first, or rather 
that for Him the distinction between natural and 
spiritual hardly exists ? He sees a field in which part 
of the seed has come to nothing, while the remainder 
has borne a luxuriant crop. " That," He says, "is 
just like My own work." In another field weeds 
appear among the wheat. He asks how the farmer 
deals with them. Perhaps already the disloyalty of 
Judas has become apparent and He knows His 
followers will often have to face this problem. 
Jesus, like the farmer, knows that the method of 

66 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

summary ejection would mean an upheaval that 
might do more harm than good ; and though tares 
will never become wheat, a Judas by the grace of 
God may become a Peter. It is better to wait till 
the harvest ; let the new mind that is in Judas 
mature to its natural fruit in the betrayal ; then 
Judas will solve his own problem. Such intro- 
ductory phrases as " How shall we illustrate the 
Kingdom of God ? M are no argument against this 
view, since this was a Rabbinic formula. 

We have called the parables illustrations : but 
they are more than illustrations ; they are in them- 
selves arguments. Jesus bids us study the feelings of 
men under varying circumstances and then have 
high and worthy thoughts of God. For the parables 
are stories of people. We speak of the parable of the 
tares ; but the story as Jesus told it was of a man 
who sowed good seed in his field and another man 
who sowed tares. What we call the parable of the 
hid treasure is really a story of a man who found hid 
treasure. 1 When we speak of the parable of the lost 
sheep, 3 it is apt to distract our attention from our 
Lord's point of view, which is not the experiences 
of the sheep but the feelings and the conduct of the 
shepherd who lost and found the sheep. The 
kingdom of God is not the irrational thing it some- 
times seems to be. A pearl merchant who sells all 
his pearls is not necessarily a fool. If he sells to buy 
one worth more than all the rest combined, he has 
made a good bargain. Men know this, and a hundred 

* Matt. 1344. * Luke 154^. 

67 



Jesus and Life 

other things like this ; but it is all lost on them 
until they learn to feel as Jesus felt, that the spiritual 
life is not less real than the life of industry and 
commerce but far more real, not less earnest but 
more earnest, with far bigger questions to be faced. 

Perhaps in no parable is it more important than in 
the Sower to remember that the parables are stories 
of people. Though we call it the parable of the sower 
we often expound it as if it were the parable of the 
different kinds of soil. Jesus is represented as telling 
the story in a despondent mood, despondent because 
His preaching seemed to make so little impression. 
The underlying assumption seems to be that the 
farmer distributed the seed equally among the four 
kinds of soil, so that only a small proportion 
of the seed yielded fruit. Is this a possible 
assumption ? No farmer would sow seed deliber- 
ately on an unploughed field-path. The seed that 
fell there fell by accident as the farmer came to the 
end of the row. Nor can we imagine that the 
farmer sowed seed otherwise than by accident or 
carelessness on a part of his field where he knew 
there was rock just below the surface. Surely the 
question of proportion between the fruitful and 
unfruitful seed does not arise. 

The point is that the seed which does mature bears 
a glorious harvest, and that if the farmer finds a 
portion of his seed comes to nothing, he does not cease 
to cultivate ; he inquires the reason. In all three 
cases of failure the cause was want of preparation. 
The first soil wanted ploughing, the second pulver- 

68 



Jesus' Use of Figurative Language 

ising, the third weeding. You cannot go to a nation 
of ignorant, superstitious, sensual idol-worshippers, 
and expect * that if you simply preach the Gospel 
they will all at once understand and be drawn to the 
beauty that is in Jesus. There is first a long task 
of hard and patient preparation. 

This is in part at least the meaning of the whole 
body of the parables ; that the spiritual world is not a 
chaos in which anything may happen, but a cosmos 
in which God works in an orderly way ; that it is 
not an abstraction of thought, but a reality ; that the 
whole subject is not one we can consider or ignore 
as we feel inclined, but that if we will not consider 
the spiritual world, face it with something of the 
intelligence we put into our daily work, it will over- 
whelm us. 

But there are spiritual experiences for which earth 
provides no parallel. When Jesus wants to picture 
the graciousness of God's dealings with men or the 
churlishness of men's dealings with God, He has to 
distort the probabilities of human life. No vine- 
dressers ever treated the messengers and the son of 
their landlord as the vinedressers of God's vineyard 
treated His messengers and His Son. 1 The invited 
guests who make frivolous pleas of the claims of 
business or pleasure for absence from the wedding 
feast* are drawn from the life, but from the story of 
no earthly king or prince. The money lender who 
freely cancels his large claims on his debtor,3 the 
employer who pays twelve times the legal rate of 

1 Matt. 2I33S. a Luke 14^5. 3 Matt. i8»7. 

69 



Jesus and Life 

wages, 1 here we are not learning of God from our 
experiences of man, but from Jesus' knowledge of 
God we are learning what man might become. 

It was not only as a stimulus to thought that 
Jesus adopted the pictorial method ; there is moral 
power in it. In our conflicts with temptation half 
the battle lies in getting a true conception of the two 
alternatives. Henry Drummond testified to the 
moral transformation effected in boys when they 
are taught to think of themselves as soldiers. 
Disobedience is now disloyalty. Rowdyism is dis- 
gracing the uniform. What abstract statements 
of the love of Jesus could have taken the place in 
Christian child-life of the picture of the Good 
Shepherd ?* Who does not find it easier to be faith- 
ful when he pictures himself as a steward guarding 
his Master's interests till He come ?3 



1 Matt. 2o9. 2 John 10". 3 Matt. 2445. 



70 



CHAPTER VII 
The Silence of the Gospels 

If men who belong to the talking professions some- 
times take cynical views of the importance of human 
speech, a study of the Gospels will not altogether 
reassure them. The silent figures of the Gospels 
play a large part in the story. The Good Samaritan 
utters only one sentence, and that is not good advice. 1 
He gives instructions for the* nursing of the wounded 
man and arranges to pay the expenses. The 
wounded traveller lying on the road, half-dead and 
perhaps unconscious, utters no syllable ; yet as 
the passers-by approach one after the other, he 
classifies them as unerringly as the botanist sorts his 
specimens. Dives speaks but Lazarus is silent. * 
There are in the Gospels two stories of a woman 
anointing Jesus; 3 in each case the woman is criti- 
cised ; in each case the discussion goes on around her ; 
in neither case do we hear the voice of the woman 
herself. In the scene in which Martha criticises 
her sister, Mary is silent. 4 Our Lord, too, knew when 
silence was the most effective speech.5 

We constantly discuss the teaching of the Gospel 
records. It is hardly too much to say that what they 

1 Luke io3<>ff. * Luke i6 J 9fi. 3 Luke 737 ff ; Mark 143^- 

4 Luke io38ff. 5 e.g., Matt. 26 6 3. 

71 



Jesus and Life 

leave unsaid is as impressive and instructive as 
what they say. It would have been so easy to be 
guilty of errors of taste or judgment ; but the Spirit 
of Jesus so controlled the mind of the early Church 
that the records are worthy of the Life. 

It seems as if the records themselves conspired 
to deprive us of all material props for our faith, to 
compel us, if we would worship Jesus Christ, to 
worship Him in spirit. We do not know for certain 
the date or even the year of His birth. There is the 
great gap in His life between the infancy and the 
baptism. Over this period a veil is drawn which 
is lifted only once, at the scene in the Temple when 
He was twelve years old. Yet there were many who 
knew Him during this period. Can we imagine that 
among the first followers no reminiscences were 
current ? We know nothing whatever of our Lord's 
personal appearance, of His voice and accent, nothing 
of His dress beyond what we can infer from the 
customs of the time. He spoke in Aramaic, so that 
even those who read the Gospels " in the original " 
are reading only Greek translations of His actual 
words. 

We are told that He was a joiner 1 ; yet we get no 
glimpse of Him working at His trade, nor do we know 
for certain whether His career as a tradesman ended 
when His public ministry began. We should have 
loved to know something of His home life, but our 
curiosity is not satisfied. We never see Him in the 
home at Nazareth (except in two very general verses 

i Mark 63. 

72 



The Silence of the Gospels 

at the end of the second chapter of Luke), and hardly 
ever in the pages of the Gospels is He brought into 
contact with the inmates of His old home. After 
the childhood of Jesus Joseph drops out of the story. 
Of Jesus' brothers from the Gospel records we know 
practically nothing but the names 1 ; of His sisters 
we do not know even the names. 

And so it is with the men and women we meet on 
the pages of the four Gospels. The kind of infor- 
mation a modern biographer or novelist delights to 
give us of the characters to whom he introduces 
us is almost completely lacking. Physical appear- 
ance is never described simply to gratify curiosity. 
If physical peculiarities are mentioned, it is only to 
explain some point otherwise unintelligible ; as when 
Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was a little man to 
explain why he ran on in front of the crowd and 
climbed a tree when he wanted to see Jesus. 2 As a 
rule we are not told whether the people with whom 
Jesus has dealings are rich or poor, educated or 
uneducated, good or bad, if such points are not 
essential to the story. Even in the apostle circle, 
while in some cases we know what occupation they 
followed, in most cases even the social stratum to 
which they belonged is beyond our knowledge. The 
Gospel writers never dream of discussing their 
individual characteristics, and we are left to infer 
these somewhat precariously from the scenes in which 
they were actors. We have not even a momentary 
glimpse of the wife or children of any of the apostles. 

1 Mark 63. * Luke 19S. 

73 



Jesus and Life 

following Jesus' advice not to criticise others 1 ? 
Was it that they realised the difficulty of reading 
another's mind, the difficulty of reading even one's 
own mind, with its complexity of impulses ? Or 
was it perhaps that they recognised the superfluity 
of such discussion in a world where facts are things 
done ? Whatever Judas' motive may have been, 
the result was the arrest and crucifixion of the 
Master. 

The silence of the Gospels is in the first place part 
of the answer of the early Church to the question : 
Who is Jesus ? The works of Matthew and Mark, 
Luke and John, are not biographies ; . they are 
Gospels. They are not lives of Jesus ; they are 
testimonies to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Other 
biographies are written to give us information ; the 
Gospels are written to give us life : and this is as true 
of the first three Gospels as it is of the fourth. Their 
aim is to set before us, in all His saving power, Jesus, 
the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. Nothing 
that does not contribute to this aim can have any 
place in the Gospel record. 

It would have been interesting and edifying to see 
Jesus in His boyhood and young manhood, to study 
Him in the workshop, to get some glimpses of His 
home life. But the Evangelists feel instinctively 
that the long years of preparation were not for the 
public -gaze. It is no mere idle curiosity that leads 
us to want to knowmore of the people mentioned 
in the Gospels — what they looked like, how they 

* Matt. 71. 

76 



The Silence of the Gospels 

spoke, what had been their past history, what was 
their subsequent career. It is natural that we 
should want to know more fully why they did the 
things they did and said the things they said. But 
these are not the all-important things, and in the 
Gospels there is no place for anything that is not of 
supreme importance. The things that interest us 
in connection with other men in the presence of 
Jesus are not even worthy of mention. The Gospel 
writers have but one subject, the Kingdom of God 
and Jesus Christ as the King of that Kingdom. To 
them nothing else counts. That there are other 
interests in life they know ; but on the pages of the 
Gospels the King and His Kingdom are not so much 
the central theme as the only theme. 

The difference between Gospels and Epistles does 
not lie in the position assigned to Jesus. In Gospel 
as in Epistle Jesus is Lord and Lord alone. The 
new thing in the Gospels is the recognition that 
what Jesus is to-day as the exalted Lord is only the 
perfecting of what He was in the days of His flesh ; 
that our conception of the Christ, the Risen Lord, 
can only be filled with content by a knowledge of 
Jesus " after the flesh/' the knowledge of Him as 
He healed and preached and taught and prayed and 
suffered. But if the first Christians, strong in their 
direct communion with the Risen Christ, were 
tempted to think they had no need to remember the 
earthly Jesus, the generation that gave us in 
the Gospels a picture of Jesus as He dwelt among us, 
full of grace and truth, are all the time not calling on 

77 



Jesus and Life 

us to admire a dead saint but to worship and trust a 
living Saviour. 

In the first three Gospels there is little discussion 
of what we call the Person of Christ ; but the 
question cpuld never be far from the minds of the 
writers. In the early chapters of our earliest Gospel, 1 
we seem to hear the writer at the close of each 
scene challenging us : " Now who was this who did 
such things ? " In incident after incident he 
delights to picture Jesus as Master, Master of Satan, 
Master of the wills of men, so that when He says 
" Come," men must come, a Master teacher, Master 
of unclean spirits, Master of leprosy and other 
diseases, Lord over sin so that He can "forgive it, 
Lord of convention and tradition, Lord of the 
Sabbath. 

The Gospels were written in response to many 
needs, but to one need in particular. At first 
apparently the Old Testament continued to be the 
Scriptures of the Christians. But the Old Testa- 
ment could never of itself nurture the devotion or 
inspire the activities of the Christian Church. If we 
are to follow Jesus we must know where Jesus went. 
If the Saviour is to save us in every part of our being, 
He must become to us more than a dim splendour. 
Even the crucifixion has little power over us till we 
know who it was that was crucified. Has the Church 
ever fairly faced the question as it presented itself to 
the infant Churches, as it presents itself to us to-day ? 
The custom in the Church of England of standing 

* Mark. 

78 



The Silence of the Gospels 

while the Gospel passage is read is at least a testi- 
mony to the fact that the Gospels are not just one 
portion of the Bible among others ; but there must 
still be multitudes of people in our Church who, 
when they open their Bibles for edification, turn 
to any one part almost as readily as to any other. 

In particular we have to deal more frankly than we 
have done in the past with the relation of the Christian 
Church to the Old Testament. The present position 
is that without remark or explanation we bind the 
two Testaments into one volume, giving the im- 
pression that they are equally authoritative as 
Christian Scriptures. Individual scholars have 
done much to guide Christian thought on the 
subject, yet mischievous ideas are still widely 
entertained. If Jesus freely distinguished in the Old 
Testament between the temporary and the abiding, 
may not His Church frankly do the same ? The 
writer recently saw a newspaper letter, the writer 
of which announced that she had no use for the 
Christian Church, because in the Jewish Scriptures a 
man's wife is classed with his ox and his ass ! Are 
we ourselves not in large measure to blame that 
this confusion of thought exists within the Church 
as well as outside ? And in non-Christian countries 
failure to distinguish between Jewish and Christian 
Scriptures is even more serious than at home. 



79 



CHAPTER VIII 
God is no Respecter of Persons 

One of the characteristic notes of the Old Testa- 
ment is the feeling of the insignificance of man, the 
transitoriness of man's life. 

" Man is like unto a breath, 
His days as a shadow that passeth." 1 

To the author of the eighth psalm it is a miracle of 
grace that God should crown with glory and majesty 
" mortal man," who is but a speck in comparison with 
God's heavens, the moon and the stars. But in the 
teaching of Jesus infinite significance is man's 
birthright as a child of God. Jesus teaches us to 
despise death, never to despise life. The psalmist 
compares man to grass, 

" Which sprouts up in the morning, 
Which blossoms and sprouts in the morning, 
But by evening is cut and withered/' 1 

Jesus looks at this same ephemeral grass ; but it 
brings Him different thoughts. It is a thing of 
beauty, a glimpse into the mind of the Artist who 
puts all His love and all His grace into His humblest 
handiwork. But in respect of its fleeting life, how 
unlike man. " If God dresses like this the common 
* Ps. 1444. » Ps. 9o! c »*. 

80 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

grass, here to-day, tossed into the oven to-morrow, 
how much more (will He remember) you."* 

To Jesus 'the tragedy of life is not the speed with 
which the end comes, but the fact that when it does 
come, so often it finds us unready. The bridegroom 
is later than we had thought, and when the warning 
cry comes our lamps are going out and we have no 
oil.* The Master arriv.es before we expect Him ; 
we are neglecting our work and thinking only of 
enjoying ourselves. 3 Life is a thing of grim earnest- 
ness, but it is not pitifully short. There is always 
time for all that God expects us to do, never time for 
anything else. Who ever thinks of the death of 
Jesus as premature ? 

But there is a more deadly pessimism than that of 
the psalmist ; the feeling that the lives of some are 
infinitely precious in the sight of God and man, that 
all others belong to the rabble who are counted by the 
head. Men are prone to accept the verdict on them 
of those to whom they have been taught to look 
up, and distinctions originally artificial have a way 
of making themselves real. " Blessed are the poor/' 
but only so long as they are merely poor : when the 
poor man becomes a pauper with a pauper mind and 
a pauper heart he is no longer blessed. The Pharisee 
can see no use for the tax-gatherer in the Temple but 
to serve as a dark background for the dazzling 
whiteness of his own soul. The tax-gatherer accepts 
the judgment ; he stands far off, so that his presence 
will not pollute the Pharisee at his prayers. 4 On 

1 Matt. 63°. ^ Matt. 25*. 3 Matt. 2450. 4 Luke 189*. 

8l 



Jesus and Life 

the testimony of Jesus the one-talent servant is in 
more danger than the five-talent servant, 1 He has 
been told so often of his worthlessness that he has 
come to think his single talent not worth using. 

We hear much to-day of the democratic ideal ; 
we know vaguely that it is a product of Christian 
teaching ; but it is not so easy to define the ideal. 
In some sense the essential equality of human 
beings seems incumbent on us as an article of belief 
and practice ; but when we try to give the phrase 
some concrete content it eludes us. Whether we look 
at physical appearance, health and strength, at intel- 
lectual tastes and powers, at capacity for appreciation 
and enjoyment, at character and disposition, what 
confronts us is not so much the wide range of 
divergence between individuals, nations and races, as 
the inconceivability that any kind of equality could 
ever be reached, even if anyone thought this a 
desirable aim. Ignorance may be instructed ; 
poverty banished ; weakness, disease and vice, more 
or less completely eradicated ; but the world of 
men and women will always be a world of variety. 

If it is economic equality we seek, equality of 
income, we are faced with the fact that from a given 
income, one man or woman can get twice as much 
health, happiness and refinement as another, and 
then what becomes of our equality ? We claim the 
equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law ; it is a 
great day in a nation's history when first the rich and 
the poor appear in their simple manhood as they 

2 Matt. 25 18 . 
82 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

sue for justice ; but outside of our courts of justice 
which indeed most of us never enter, we are not 
men and women but only members of our class. 

To many the pathway to equality has seemed to lie 
through the vote ; surely here if anywhere as we drop 
our voting papers into the ballot-box, each man 
counts for one and no man for more than one. The 
ballot-box has worked wonders and will work greater 
wonders still ; but we have now experience enough 
to know that this alone will never " fill up the valleys, 
level the heights and hillocks.' ' Sometimes the 
democratic claim is for equality of opportunity to 
develop and use the faculties that God has given us. 
Does the world well to be angry with the sulky 
cowards who will not use their one talent when all 
the while men with five talents find every door 
barred by which they might enter to trade their 
gifts for the benefit of the human race, perhaps go 
to their graves not knowing that they have these 
talents because the world has never troubled to 
enquire ? The removal of barriers from the path of 
aspirants to fame and usefulness will mark a long 
stage on the road to Christian democracy, but will 
still leave us with contemptuous Pharisees and self- 
abasing publicans in many spheres. 

What rankles in men's minds is not the class 
system and the sense of inferiority, but artificial 
and external principles of classification, the sense 
of unjust inferiority. So often, when we are judged by 
men and women, we are left with the feeling that we 
have been measured by a pitiful inch tape of speech 

83. 



Jesus and Life 

or dress or social code, of money or abode or caste, 
instead of by the big measure of God's love and 
justice. How many of us would claim that we can 
look with impartial eye at a millionaire or a beggar, 
a king or a prisoner in a gaol, at a personal enemy, 
a leper, a negro ? 

In what sense does Jesus make men equal ? As 
the panorama of the Gospel story passes before our 
eyes, we see Jesus in contact with all kinds of people : 
men and women, and little children ; a king of 
sorts, a proconsul, judges, and humble subjects ; 
His own countrymen and foreigners ; Jews, 
Samaritans and heathen ; rich men and beggars ; 
healthy people and sick people ; wise men, fools, and 
madmen ; scholars and illiterate men ; honest 
people and thieves ; moral and immoral. In every 
case we feel that Jesus gets down beneath the 
externals, down to the manhood and the woman- 
hood. He is deceived by no show, however fair ; by 
no external appearance, however repulsive. Jesus 
too classifies men. As He goes on His way, they 
range themselves on His right hand or His left ; 
but everyone gets justice. 

We have looked at the silence of the Gospels, the 
things they leave unsaid about men as well as about 
Jesus. As we stand by His side and watch the men 
and women go by, we forget to ask about them the 
questions we would ask, were we reading them by any 
other light than the Light of the world. 

Jesus wants twelve men to be with Him and carry 
on His work when He is gone ; twelve theological 

84 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

students with a view to their subsequent appointment 
as ordained clergymen and missionaries and possibly 
bishops. What qualification will He look for ? 
It is characteristic that we are not even told. It is 
an interesting and profitable speculation how many 
of the twelve, taking them as they were when Jesus 
called them, would have been accepted as regular 
students by a modern theological college ; and even 
after Jesus considered their training complete, how 
many of them would have been regarded by a modern 
Church as fit for ordination. 

We fear that some of the men He chose knew little 
about etiquette and that even their manners wanted 
polishing. Peter in some respects was not at all 
a nice gentleman. In looking for His candidates 
Jesus was not repelled by the sound of hammering, 
nor even by the smell of fish. He was not at all par- 
ticular about scholarship. If He looked for gifts of 
oratory or organising ability the fact is not men- 
tioned. Not that Jesus depreciated any of these 
things ; some of them He may well have had in 
mind. But the men to whom He said " Come " 
were men who, when they came, henceforth had no 
interest in life but to know Him and to serve Him. 

What of the pious man's suspicion of all who 
approach God in other formulae and with another 
ritual than his own ? The man who helped the 
wounded traveller was a Samaritan. 1 The one 
grateful leper among the ten was a Samaritan. * 
The father of the prodigal belonged to no sect. 
1 Luke io33. * Luke 17 16 . 

85 • 



Jesus and Life 

To no class was Jesus more attracted, by no class was 
He more warmly welcomed, than the " sinners " 
who had little use for the priests and their services 
and their laws. 

How does Jesus comport Himself before rank and 
official position ? We see Him before Herod and 
before Pilate, meeting them in circumstances in 
which with most of us our instinctive respect for 
rank and title are at their highest. He is their 
prisoner and they have over Him the power of life 
and of death. But in the trial scene it is Jesus who 
has all the dignity. Neither Pilate nor Herod 
can ever have looked or felt so small or mean as they 
did that day. Yet in the Gospels there is none of the 
plebeian prejudice against rank. Joanna, the wife 
of Herod's steward, was one of His followers. 1 Jesus 
answered the petition of an army officer* and the 
petition of a beggar3 with equal readiness. 

The Gospel narratives do not gloss over the humble 
social position of the apostles, but neither do they 
gloat over it ; they simply state it as a fact. When 
Paul, the scholar, the ex-Pharisee, boasts that he 
" withstood to the face " Cephas, the Galilean 
fisherman,4 with pride in the courage he showed, 
Jesus has indeed introduced new standards. 

Wealth has more power than most of the distorting 
mediums through which we look at our neighbours 
to magnify the virtues and hide the blemishes. A 
rich man comes to see Jesus, a man with youth, 
education, influence, character, everything that 

i Luke 83. * Luke 7*^ 3 Mark io46ff. 4 Galatians 2". 

86 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

makes life attractive and beautiful. Yet the last we 
see of him is as he turns away because the gateway 
into life that Jesus shows him is so narrow and He 
will not widen it an inch even for a capture like this. 1 
But there is no bitterness against wealth in the 
Evangelist's telling of the story. He leaves us with 
no feeling but grief, an almost personal grief, as the 
young man's eager face' overcasts and he goes slowly 
and sadly away. And there are other rich men in 
the Gospel story who, in the end, choose differently : 
Zacchaeus, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathaea ; 
though each of them in his own way illustrates the 
pitfalls that wait for the rich man as he seeks the 
Kingdom. 

If Jesus turns His search-light on to the rich, no less 
in His presence are we compelled to overcome our 
repugnance to poverty, even to pauperism, and its 
ugly accompaniments ; to pierce beneath the rags 
and sores and find the man, with a man's longings, 
a man's feelings to be hurt or respected, a man's soul 
to be saved. For here too the Gospels teach, not 
by preaching but by giving insight. Half of our 
cruelty is ignorance. We judge whole classes of men 
after we have first shut our eyes : Jesus compels us 
to look at people, and when we look at them, often we 
find them transfigured. We speak of the change 
which passed over Jesus on the Mount of Trans- 
figuration. Would it not be nearer the truth to say 
that the change was in the mind of Peter, James, and 
John ; that for a little while those who had entered 

1 Mark 10™. 

87- 



Jesus and Life 

most deeply into His spirit saw Him as He was and 
as He always was ? 

If the people were blind to Jesus, no less were they 
blind to each other. To the pilgrims passing through 
Jericho on their way to the feast at Jerusalem, 
Bartimaeus was a blind beggar on whom it was a 
good work to bestow a copper. Jesus has taught us 
to look on him and on all blind beggars and on all 
unlovely human beings with new eyes. Bartimaeus' 
persistent, reckless faith was as welcome to Jesus 
as the marvellous trust of the army captain. In the 
last sad days three tributes were paid to Jesus that 
must have been as cold waters to a thirsty. soul : the 
triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the anointing at 
Bethany, the trustful prayer on the cross. It was 
the blind beggar that started the pilgrims on their 
chorus of praise to the Son of David, 1 it was a woman 
who anointed Him for His burial,* the trustful prayer 
that cheered His last moments came from a thief.3 

A prejudice that dies hard, is the dislike and dis- 
trust of foreigners. Jesus spoke much on the subject, 
and when the question of the admission of the 
Gentiles to the Church arose it was natural that these 
sayings should be treasured. In the days of Elijah 
and Elisha, Jesus reminds us, it was a heathen widow 
of Zarephath and the heathen Naaman the Syrian, 
that God thought worthy of His gifts. 4 The men of 
Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah, the 
Queen of the South made a pilgrimage from unknown 
distances to hear the wisdom of Solomon. When 

x Mark io47. » Mark 143 s . 3 Luke 234*. 4 Luke 4*1. 

88 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

they saw the heavenly vision, dim though it was, they 
were not disobedient to it. Tyre and Sidon, even 
Sodom and Gomorra, would have been more 
responsive than the Jews if they had had the same 
privileges, and God will deal tenderly with them. 1 

The guests at the feast in God's kingdom will be 
chosen from a wider circle than we think. They will 
come from all points of the compass 3 ; they will 
have many names for God and their theology will 
be of many quaint and unconventional patterns. 
It was a Gentile army-captain of whose boundless 
faith Jesus said that He had met nothing like it 
anywhere in Israel. 3 It was to a heathen woman that 
Jesus said : " Great is your faith."4 A pagan army- 
captain and his company paid the first tribute to 
Jesus after His death : " Truly this man was super- 
human. "5 Are we sure that the Christian view of 
the relative position of Christians and pagans is 
always nearer the truth than was the Jewish view ? 
It is a humbling and an educative experience to work 
among "the heathen/' Perhaps if we were more 
willing to learn we might be more able to teach. 

Yet the Gospels are just. They emphasise the 
lesson the Jews needed most, that even outside of 
Israel there were men who feared God and did what 
was right. But there were pagans as there were 
Jews who did neither ; and the Gospel history makes 
prominent the fact that Gentile joined with Jew in 
the travesty of justice that culminated on Calvary. 

1 Matt. io*5, iiaaff. 2 Luke 13*9. 3 Luke 79. 4 Matt. 15a 8 . 
5 Matt. 2754. See Dr. McNeile's Commentary. 

89 . 



Jesus and Life 

Of pride-engendering class distinctions the 
scholar's contempt fox the uneducated, based though 
it claims to be on a superiority that is essential, is not 
the least objectionable. The knowledge that does 
not humble us and teach us sympathy is no true 
knowledge. On the whole, the educated men with 
whom Jesus has dealings make a repellent picture : 
the big lawyers, the professors and theologians. 
But the New Testament has none of the illiterate 
man's suspicion of learning. It does full justice to 
the achievements of Peter and the other " unlearned " 
apostles ; yet we try in vain to think what the 
history of Christianity would have been without the 
scholarship and the speculative power of the apostle 
Paul. 

Nor can we trace in the history any professional 
bias. If the Jewish clergy have been unfaithful to 
their trust, it is the men that are at fault, not the 
office. They must be replaced by a Christian clergy. 
If the private soldiers behaved shamefully at the 
trial and the crucifixion, the sterling worth of one 
officer 1 and the honesty of another* have saved the 
honour of the military name. 

The Gospels too provide material for a study 
of the psychology of a crowd, and of Jesus' attitude 
to the crowd. The unnamed multitudes play a large 
part, on the whole no dishonourable part, in the 
history. In the early part of His ministry Jesus 
lived much in the crowd ; and when in the later days 
He confined His teaching more to the quiet of the 

» Luke 7»ff. » Matt. 2754. 

90 






God is no Respecter of Persons 

disciple school, ultimately it was for the sake 
of the crowd. But, whether wanting to make Him a 
King or to crucify Him, to be healed or fed or taught, 
the murmur of the multitude is seldom long silent. 
Jesus always feels the pathos of the crowd ; He 
cannot look on a throng of people without wanting 
to help, be they peasants with weary bodies and 
hungry souls, or the citizens of the capital. 

And Jesus believes in the crowd. It has the fatal 
weakness that it so easily becomes the prey of un- 
scrupulous schemers ; but when the " common 
people " are left to their own judgment they can be 
trusted. All through the story till the last chapter, 
the multitudes, however dimly they understood, 
saw more in Jesus than did the Pharisees. Jesus' 
authority, like that of the Baptist, came from God ; 
but the authority of both is ratified by the judg- 
ment of the crowd. 1 And Jesus' influence over them 
lay largely in this, that to Him the crowd was never 
just a crowd ; it was a crowd of individuals. He 
never healed in the mass, He dealt with each case 
separately. * If He would feed the multitude it 
must first become an orderly multitude. 3 Each 
sheep in the hundred is never just one in a hundred, 
and when it leaves the fold it becomes the one in a 
hundred. 4 

The lesson of it all is summed up in the last crowded 
hours of Jesus' earthly life. All sorts of men and 
women play their part, greater or humbler, in the 
drama : Pilate, Herod, the officers and soldiers ; 

1 Matt. 2i» 6 . 2 Luke 440. 3 Mark 639'. 4 Luke 154^ 

91, 



Jesus and Life 

Annas and Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin and the wit- 
nesses ; the servants ; the apostles and Judas ; 
the crowd ; the passers-by ; the thieves ; the weeping 
women in the background ; Jesus always in the 
midst. In the light of the central figure we seem 
to see them all for the moment as God sees them ; 
as they will see themselves on the judgment day ; 
but the actors themselves were blind, all in their own 
degree. 

To see men as Jesus saw them is in the first place 
to see them in the naked reality of their manhood, 
stripped of their trappings or their rags. It is not 
superiority that irks us but contempt, the contempt 
of a quack superiority that thanks God it is not as 
other men ; whether its claims are based on birth 
or breeding or race, on health and strength, on edu- 
cation or money. When we meet true worth we think 
it no indignity to stand afar off with bowed head. 
Jesus deals very tenderly with the outcasts of every 
sphere ; but He deals with them truthfully. The 
tax-gatherer is forgiven but he is not white- washed, 1 
the harlot is forgiven but her past life is neither 
ignored nor extenuated,* the thief enters Paradise, 
but he enters not as an honest man but as a repentant 
thief.3 

It is hard to see men as they are : apart from the 
light that Jesus gives it is impossible. But the 
demands of Christian justice and Christian equality 
are not yet satisfied. Jesus asks, what men so 
seldom ask, how we came to be what we are. The 

« Luke 18M. a Luke 747. 3 Luke 2340^. 

Q2 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

world judges us by our achievements ; Jesus compares 
our achievements with our equipment. The man 
with the one* talent was not blamed because he could 
not produce the fruit of two talents or of five. 

Sometimes it is not in equipment but in oppor- 
tunity that we differ. The burden of life is unequally 
distributed. Some the sunset finds exhausted 
by the toil of a long day and the sweltering heat of 
the noonday sun. Others work for a brief glad hour 
in the cool of the evening.* One generation wins 
only at the cost of blood and pain and loss the right 
to live the lives God meant them to live ; their 
children enter into a peaceful heritage. In Christian 
countries the great Choice does not often involve the 
shame and peril that tax the courage of the follower of 
Jesus in other lands. The young churches of to-day 
reap the fruits of the intellectual and moral conflicts 
of the first Christian centuries. If those who have 
borne the brunt of the fight are not entitled to play 
the Pharisee over those who spend peaceful days in 
the conquered territory, still less does it become us 
to criticise the dusty, it may be blood-stained 
garments, the uncouth manners, the narrow bigoted 
outlook, of those who made our faith, our worship, 
our life, possible. When the day of reckoning comes, 
all who have done all they were invited or able to do 
share alike, and the share of each comes from the j oint 
product of the work of all. 

Jesus remembers too, that though knowledge is 
not goodness, it is an indispensable condition of good- 

* Matt. 20^. 

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Jesus and Life 

ness. The light of God's truth reaches us through 
varying densities of cloud. Everyone who has ever 
sat in a criminal court must have felt what a travesty 
of justice was even our boasted impartiality. We 
send men to gaol because the ignorance and vice and 
indolence in which they have been trained have 
borne their natural fruit. We have at long last 
recognised that our relation to the criminal does 
not begin when he enters the dock. Can we claim 
that even now we have made much more than a 
beginning ? 

To see men as Jesus saw them is to see them as 
they are now in the present ; to look to their past and 
consider what were their capacities, their opportun- 
ities of knowing and doing. But we do not look on 
men with Christian eyes till we see in them, as Jesus 
saw, the vision of what they may become. The 
position of men at the feast of life is not fixed for 
all time. If ignorance or infirmity or social custom 
have placed us in a lowly station, our host may call 
us nearer the head of the table and fit us to hold our 
own there. The gulf that separates class from class 
is not the impassable thing we sometimes think it is. 
A little trainings little sympathy and encouragement, 
and lo ! the pariah becomes a Brahmin. Apart from 
Jesus the leading apostles were simply members of 
the crowd. The men of Nazareth had no faith in 
Jesus because they had known Him as one of them- 
selves, and they could not imagine that there were 
within Him undiscovered possibilities. 1 
* Matt. 13535 
94 



God is no Respecter of Persons 

When Bartimaeus gets his eyes, with his earnest 
faith and his grit, he will tower above the men who 
used to give him alms. 1 The leper was not always 
a leper ; let him come into vital contact with Jesus, 
and he will make good his place in society, show us 
that leprosy with its ugliness and its helplessness 
is but of the accidents of life, and teach us lessons of 
gratitude and courtesy. 3 To-day the demoniac is 
the terror of the lakeside. If he comes face to face 
with Jesus, to-morrow he will be the Christian evan- 
gelist. The harlot is beyond the pale, outside 
the range of touch or speech, even of the thought of 
the respectable. When she hears from Jesus the 
word of forgiveness, with her 'enthusiasm of gratitude, 
her impulsive devotion, she will win a place in the 
Church of God far above many of her spotless sisters 
who need no repentance. 3 

Past, present and future thus combine in the Chris- 
tian estimate of personality. At the Lord's Table,when 
it is indeed the Table of our Lord, we have achieved 
in some measure a Christian democracy. We do 
not sit down as master and slave, employer and 
servant, male and female, rich and poor, white 
and brown, strong and weakling, learned and ignorant. 
We take our places as children of our common Father, 
who alike owe our life and our salvation to God the 
Son. We see the littleness of the things that separate, 
brought to the measure of God's love in Jesus that 
unites. We remember our neighbours' temptations 
and hindrances and our own misuse of God's gifts. 

1 Mark io46ff. » Luke 17"^. S Luke 736S. 

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Jesus and Life 

We think too of the day when faith shall have done 
its perfect work ; when, all our lameness and our 
blindness forgotten, they and we shall enter God's 
Temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God ; and 
at last men shall see us in what all along has been the 
very truth of us, waiting to be revealed by the power 
of Jesus. 



9 6 



CHAPTER IX 
The Colour Question 

A question arises. Has Jesus got the facts of 
the world behind Him in the spirit of faith and hope- 
fulness with which He meets all classes of disabilities, 
physical, mental, moral, social, racial ? Or are 
there people doomed by the very circumstances 
of their birth to perpetual vassalage ? To put 
it concretely, are the colour bar and the sex bar, 
for example, temporary and removable ; or are 
they part of the constitution of things ? 

The race question, especially in its more virulent 
form of the colour question, has lurid possibilities 
in the near future ; and it is not easy to see where we 
are going. Here again Jesus has given us no direct 
guidance, yet we have seen enough of His dealings with 
" dogs " of all kinds to know in some measure what 
He would demand of us. But if we wish to Christ- 
ianise colour feeling we must first understand it. 
Of all barriers that separate men from one another 
it would seem as if the colour barrier would be the last 
to be brought down. In its power to prevent us seeing 
men and women as they are, colour is more effective 
than education or birth or money or rank or even 
clothes. Yet the explanation of this curious effect 

97 . 

7 • 



Jesus and Life 

of difference in complexion is not obvious. How 
far is it due to instinct, how far to actual facts, 
how far to a vicious tradition ? 

The idea that a fairer skin implies racial superiority 
is ancient and wide-spread. Jeremiah's proverb 
" Can the Ethiopian change his skin ? " implies that 
the Ethiopian in contact with the fairer men of other 
nations would have liked to change his skin. Amos 
taunts Israel by reminding her that her people 
were no better in God's sight than the Ethiopians. 
" As for you, are ye not as the Ethiopians unto me, 
O children of Israel ? " " No more important, 
no better, no dearer, than the black men on the banks 
of the Nile."* Indian caste distinctions, if not 
originally colour distinctions, are at least inseparably 
bound up with colour questions. For the black and 
the brown races have their own colour problems, 
their own pride and shame as they approximate to 
or recede from the standard of the white man. 

Yet we can hardly say that the association of a 
fairer skin with racial superiority is instinctive. 
Many in Britain have numbered among their ac- 
quaintances, or even their friends, people who were 
wholly or partially of coloured descent, without the 
faintest consciousness of any colour barrier. The 
feeling that would exclude even educated Indians 
from certain hotels is in Britain a pure exotic. Im- 
pressionable people even find a certain element of 
romance in a dark skin, and Othello can still find his 
Desdemona. There have been ages when, quite apart 
* Dr. McFadyen : " A Cry for Justice," p. 131. 

98 



The Colour Question 

from any Christian influence, an Oriental or African 
origin formed no bar to the most effective recognition 
in Europe. As the author of " Ecce Homo" reminds 
us : M So signally, so much more than in later and 
Christian ages, were national distinctions obliterated 
under the Empire, that men of all nations and 
languages competed freely under the same political 
system for the highest honours of the state and of 
literature. The good Aurelius and the great Trajan 
were Spaniards. So were Seneca and Martial. 
Severus was an African. The leading jurists were 
of Oriental extraction. "* In a famous verse of 
the Epistle to the Galatians* Paul tells us that in Jesus 
the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and 
free man, male and female, has been abolished : he 
makes no reference to what to us would be the greatest 
triumph of all, that we should forget the difference 
between fair skin and dark skin. 

Apparently it is only when we meet the coloured 
foreigner in his own home, or when he invades our 
territory in sufficient numbers to become an important 
factor in the life of the people, that we become 
conscious of hostility. But colour Pharisaism, 
even if not instinctive, is easily acquired. To put 
one's foot on the deck of an Indian liner 
is to inherit the tradition. So far as India is 
concerned we are not speaking of race hatred, of 
which there one sees comparatively little, at least 
on the British side. Nor are we thinking of 
cruelty, which; at least in its more extreme mani- 

1 Page 124, 1892 edition. • Gal. 3*8. 

99 * 



Jesus and Life 

festations; is sufficiently held in check by the law. 
The relations between Europeans, especially the 
older men holding responsible posts, and their 
Indian colleagues and subordinates, are often friendly, 
sometimes even affectionate. We are thinking rather 
of an attitude, of the European's ineradicable con- 
viction that any white man, simply because of his 
whiteness, is of the " heaven-born ; " and that all 
coloured men are morally if not physically " niggers." 

One reason for the special bitterness of colour 
contempt is that it combines in itself all other forms 
of Pharisaism. The Oriental suffers by comparison 
in this way — that the Europeans who go to tropical 
countries are picked men, above the average in 
physique, in grit and resource, in education and 
general ability, far above the average of their race 
in point of wealth, usually holding positions of re- 
sponsibility which bring out the best that is in them. 
It is astonishing how soon in such an atmosphere 
one contrives to forget the unpleasant facts of life at 
home. We compare the people among whom we live, 
not with the real people at home and the actual con- 
ditions of their lives, but with people and conditions 
that exist nowhere outside of our imaginations. 

The white man attaches enormous importance to 
his physical superiority over the coloured. We 
may grant that this superiority usually exists ; 
and we may conveniently forget the giants among 
the American negroes, the recent history of the prize 
ring, the stamina of the Japanese, and the fine speci- 
mens of physical manhood one sometimes sees 

ioo 



The Colour Question 

among people who have lived all their lives in the 
plains of India. 

It is difficult to say how far colour contempt is 
due to economic causes and is a form of fear. Econ- 
nomic considerations certainly aggravate racial 
feeling, as is sufficiently evidenced by the bitter 
British and especially Colonial and American hos- 
tility to the competition of coloured labour with white 
labour ; a hostility due to the white man's fear of the 
lowering of his standard of living. Sometimes also 
there are curious developments of the colour feeling 
that would seem to suggest that the economic 
factor predominates. Booker Washington, for 
example, was once escorting home an invalided Red 
Indian student of the Hampton Institute. When 
he stopped at an hotel he found that while the Indian 
could be received without difficulty, he himself, as 
a negro, was excluded. 

Yet it is easy to exaggerate the influence of the 
fear of economic subjugation by a race whose civil- 
isation is believed to be inferior. Men like Sir 
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, resent the 
fact that while they are in Britain they are treated 
as educated gentlemen, but when they go back to 
their own country, in the eyes of Anglo-India they are 
only Indians. Race feeling is certainly not confined 
to men engaged in industrial or commercial life. 

Among the ancient Greeks and Romans the counter- 
part of the modern white man's feeling for a dark skin 
was the contempt for the barbarian races. They 
judged men by their attainments in literature, 

zoi. 



Jesus and Life 

in the arts and sciences, in general " culture." 
The cultured man's feeling for the barbarian is 
still no small element in colour prejudice. In this 
connection the white man has been guilty of a false 
analogy. Many of the coloured races with which 
we first came in contact were, judged by any stand- 
ard, degraded ; and our feeling of superiority was 
in their case no mere race prejudice. Semi- 
consciously we have tended to class all coloured 
races with the lowest of them, and sometimes we who 
have judged have been largely or wholly ignorant 
of the literature, the philosophy, the art, of the 
races we have affected to despise. 

We must take account also of the influence of 
religious feeling, an influence by no means confined 
to religious men. The Jewish contempt for the 
Gentile, while in part racial, was in large measure 
religious. This tradition also we have inherited, 
with many others more valuable. It is difficult 
for one trained in the atmosphere of a spiritual 
religion to view otherwise than with disgust and 
abhorrence the religious practices of polytheism, 
especially of idolatry. All the associations of the 
word " heathen n have contributed to our concep- 
tion of " coloured man." 

Perhaps however in the last analysis this par- 
ticular form of race prejudice is based chiefly on un- 
conscious or semi-conscious moral feeling. The 
Oriental virtues are in a measure different from the 
Occidental. We judge men by their possession 
or their lack of the qualities we most admire, 

102 



The Colour Question 

naturally our own. If one could induce the average 
European to put into words his feeling towards 
some of the Oriental races, he would probably say 
that in his judgment they are not Men. If one were 
to investigate further his conception of a Man, no 
doubt one would find it is a creature that bears but 
the slightest resemblance to the Man described in 
the Sermon on the Mount : a being with plenty of 
physical courage, a certain aggressiveness, a resolute 
insistence on one's rights, a determination to take no 
kind of injury "lying down," the possession of initi- 
ative and resource, general reliability, and within 
recognised limits, honesty and love of fair play. 

But the Oriental has cultivated patience and 
courtesy, obedience, tact, and quiet endurance of 
wrong. We are not the best judges of the relative 
importance in the light of eternity of the virtues he 
and we have chosen to cultivate. The Oriental 
does not always shine in that complex of mental 
and moral qualities we sum up under the head of 
reliability ; but especially in some of the humbler 
occupations there are countless instances of marvel- 
lous fidelity to trust. The Oriental tradition on 
the subject of courage is not quite the same as the 
Western, but only in defiance of all history could 
anyone maintain that courage, whether physical or 
moral, is simply a question of climate. And much 
of the proverbial dishonesty of the East is due to a 
different conception of the requirements of honesty. 

Colour is only one symptom, though one of the 
most obvious symptoms, of race ; but it is so closely 

103 



Jesus and Life 

connected with deeper and more essential race 
characteristics that one can hardly wonder that 
to the average man our biggest, one had almost said, 
our most hopeless, race problems appear simply as 
" the colour question.'' Perhaps the Christian Church 
has no more important task in front of her than to 
teach men Christian thoughts about the coloured 
races. Them, too, we must learn to see as they are, 
not with the jaundiced eyes of colour prejudice. 
We have to know them and we can know them only 
if we take the trouble to know them. 

To see them as they are involves looking at their 
achievements, especially their achievements in the 
world of beauty and truth. We have to learn to 
judge them, not by the standard of manhood that we 
have chosen to exalt, but by the standard of the 
Perfect Man. If they accept us at our own valuation, 
as too often they do, it only makes it all the harder 
for us to judge them impartially. Many influences 
conspire to hide them from us, influences of language 
and dress, custom, poverty, contempt or indifference 
on the one side; suspicion and fear of ridicule on the 
other. We never do Christian justice to the brown man 
or the black till we have penetrated the disguise. 

Is there then a natural equality of all races ? We do 
not know what the phrase means ; but it is Christian 
teaching that each individual in each race is an end 
to God and should be an end to man, that each 
individual has infinite possibilities and is worthy of 
our infinite pains. To speak of one Oriental people, 
the Indian is peculiarly susceptible to sympathy and 

104 



The Colour Question 

kindness ; and in all our problems in India, including 
the political, it is impossible to exaggerate the 
importance of the personal element. What the 
Indian wants in his heart of hearts is not any abstract 
equality with the European, but to be treated not as 
a freak, nor a problem, nor as a dangerous animal to 
be soothed, but as a human being made in God's 
image like ourselves. If we treat him otherwise, 
our criticism of him will be much less penetrating 
than his criticism of us — which we shall never know. 

Jesus meets every claimant for help with bound- 
less confidence. The power of God that is in Him is 
ready for any emergency. So far as we can see, the 
idea that there may be some disease too far advanced 
for His help, some mind so deranged that the light 
of reason is extinguished beyond recall, some soul 
so enslaved by sin that forgiveness and renewal are 
inconceivable, does not once occur to Him. The 
only people for whom He has no hope are those who 
are not conscious that they have any need of help. 

It is in certain branches of the mission field that 
this faith is brought to its supreme test. Are there 
races whose physical configuration is such that they 
are for ever doomed to a low standard of intelligence 
and therefore of life ? Is vice so much in the blood 
of certain races that Christian virtue is for them for 
ever impossible ? What of the influence of a tropical 
sun, enervating physically, mentally, morally ? 
We remind ourselves that the physical effects of a 
tropical climate are very imperfectly understood ; 
some of the facts of tropical life on which our pessimists 

105. 



Jesus and Life 

fely are almost certainly due not to climate but to 
other and preventible causes. Only when Christian 
influences have had free play for a sufficient length 
of ftime shall we be able to trace climate and heathen 
tradition to their respective effects. But whatever 
obstacles may be pointed out by whatever science 
or want of science, we remember that, when Jairus' 
friends brought word that his daughter was dead, 
Jesus was in no way disconcerted. As Dr. Glover 
has said : " Jesus goes on." 

Jesus has told us that the word " impossible " 
has no place in the vocabulary of a Christian. If 
we say to a mountain" Rise and fling yourself into 
the sea," 1 it will be done. We know now that this 
is literally true. With modern appliances we could 
take the highest peak in the Himalayas and hurl it 
into the Indian Ocean. It would take time and 
patience and ingenuity and much hard work, but the 
only vital question would be : Do we really want it 
done ? The triumphs of science and of all material 
endeavour are for those who believe that all things 
are possible to man's arm, man's brain, man's will. 
And whether we have been called to heal African 
jungle tribes or the drunkards and sensualists of 
Christian countries, the gift of life from the dead 
is in the hands, not of those who listen to the voices 
that say : " The case is hopeless ; trouble the Master 
no further," but of those who hearken to the quiet 
reassuring word : " Do not be afraid ; only have 
faith."* 

1 Mark n*3. * Mark 53 6 . 

106 



CHAPTER X 

The Women of the Gospel Story 

The Gospel records give little encouragement to 
the theory that women are only female men, and that 
their passport to recognition is the extent to which 
they do the things that men do. It is hardly too much 
to say that, quite apart from grammatical indications, 
no woman of Gospel story could be mistaken for any 
man. We hear much of the " equality " of the 
sexes ; but even if we knew what the phrase meant, 
assuming that the relation between the sexes as 
portrayed in the Gospels is to be described in mathe- 
matical language, equality hardly seems the word. In 
what sense was Mary Magdalene the " equal " of 
Herod or of the soldiers who jeered at Christ ? 

Sometimes we are told that what the Gospel has 
done for women is to abolish the pagan idea that they 
exist only as a means to the comfort and the pleasure 
of men ; in technical language that women are to be 
regarded as an " end," never simply as a " means." 
This is true and yet it is misleading. Would it not 
be more accurate to say that what Jesus did was to 
bring women — all the more convincingly that it was 
never done explicitly — under the whole scope of the 
moral law ? Women have the same right that men 

107 



Jesus andfLife 

have to be regarded as " ends," the same duty that 
men have never to ^regard themselves as ends, 
to recognise that they can reach self-development 
only by self-suppression in the service of others. 

Woman's place in a Christian Society is secured not 
so much by any legislation of Jesus as by the absence 
of any special legislation ; by His simple assumption 
that all He said applied to women as well as to men, 
to men as well as to women ; by His unfailing treat- 
ment of the women He met as responsible beings, 
whose needs were as clamant as those of men and 
more clamant, who were as capable of under- 
standing spiritual teaching, and often more capable of 
responding to it. 

Heathen conceptions of women die hard. Pious 
people tell us with a sigh of conscious failure that the 
majority at Church service or prayer meeting is 
composed of women. The " virile " preacher who 
attracts men to listen to his eloquence is a being of a 
higher order than the ordinary preacher who has 
to be content with a larger proportion of the inferior 
sex. Have we quite rid ourselves, even in the Church, 
of the conception of women as ceremonially unclean ? 
Jesus was grateful to the woman who anointed Him 
for His death : to-day a woman is not worthy to 
distribute the symbols of that death ; in some 
churches is not allowed to tell the story of that death. 
In Jesus Christ there is neither male nor female — 
except in the Church of Jesus Christ ! 

Jesus made all kinds of food clean. He taught 
us not to call the Gentiles common or unclean. 

108 



The Women of the Gospel Story 

Some day we shall extend the great emancipating 
word even to our fellow-Christians ; and lastly — or 
will women see to it that it is not lastly — women too 
will bring their gifts to the altar and the Church will 
find that the altar is unstained. 

The delicacy and reticence with which every story 
is told in which we see Jesus meeting women is a 
triumph of Christian art, a triumph in which we 
feel the impact of the Master's own spirit. But we 
would have had more. If we could have had a 
fifth Gospel, we would have had a Gospel by a woman, 
by some Priscilla among the disciples, who could 
have told us so much that the men missed, especially 
about the women themselves. All through the story 
the women are in the background, in accordance with 
the tradition of the time ; yet all through the story 
they make their influence felt, sometimes in subtle 
ways. The apostles have left their homes ; but 
they have not forgotten their homes and their dear 
inmates, and once at least they remind Jesus of them. 1 

We have already noted the silence of the women in 
the Gospels. We know the names of Jesus' brothers, 
not of His sisters. We cannot help wondering 
whether it was some supposed ethical interest that 
suppressed nearly all references to wives of apostles 
and left to us only one or two chance hints. Our 
knowledge even of Jesus' mother is of the scantiest. 
We have hardly any record of the ministry to the 
harlots, who could hardly have entered the kingdom 
in such numbers unless Jesus had made special 

1 Mark io*8ff. 
I©9, 



Jesus and Life 

appeals to them ; though the gem preserved by 
some happy providence at the beginning of the 
eighth chapter of John shows that our Lord's methods 
in His rescue work were as unconventional and as 
effective as His methods in all His other work ; and 
the story of the anointing in Luke gives an illumin- 
ating glimpse of the impression Jesus made on these 
outcasts. 1 

Incidentally this last story reminds us that to be a 
" man of the world " is to be the antipodes of Jesus. 
The woman's repentance seems sincere, her grati- 
tude and love genuine. But in such cases the wise 
course is always suspicion, hesitation, probation, 
even cynicism. It may be, but Jesus was not anxious 
to be wise. The woman had repented and her whole 
heart went out to the Saviour who had saved her. 
Jesus will utter no word that casts a shadow of 
suspicion on her sincerity, of doubt on her future. 
He does not even tell her to sin no more : " Your 
sins are forgiven," He says. Nor does He invite 
her to stay within the sphere of His influence, but 
He tells her to go, to " go in peace." 

Jesus' own reticence with regard to women is 
sometimes striking, but always explicable. There 
was no woman among the twelve apostles ; 
perhaps in the nature of the case there could not be : 
the constant journeyings of the apostle band 
provide all the explanation we need, Jesus did not 
hesitate to draw on women's work or the domestic 
life for the subject matter of His parables;* yet alike 
i Luke 7l 6ff . 2 Matt. 13SJ. 

110 



The Women of the Gospel Story 

in the history and the teaching the almost complete 
absence of scenes of home-life is characteristic and 
touching. When Jesus blessed the children it was not 
in their own homes. 1 In the wedding parables in the 
form in which we have them, the " Marriage Feast of 
the King's Son "a and " the Ten Maidservants, "3 there 
is no mention of the bride. But the former is con- 
cerned with the feast, not with the wedding ; and 
in the latter there is good ground for believing 
that in the original form of the parable the maid- 
servants went out to meet " the bridegroom and the 
bride/' and that this was altered for theological 
reasons. 4 

In the story of the Prodigal Sons the absence of a 
mother or a sister leaves such a blank in the welcome 
home that the great Word-Artist must have had 
some compelling reason for the omission. It is 
in the first place a tale of earthly love and forgive- 
ness ; yet the father, though he does not exactly 
represent God, is so meant to carry our thoughts on 
to God that, even at the cost of artistic effect, Jesus 
avoids all features in the story that might seem to 
countenance the degrading heathen conception of 
female counterparts to the male deities. 

If we do not see all we should like to see of Jesus' 
work among women, we see the fruits of it. The 
boundless love and devotion of the women of Gospel 
story is their testimony to what He has done for 
them and been to them. The women of the Gospels 

1 Mark io^ff. a Matt. 22 lff . 3 Matt. 25^. 

4 See Dr. McNeile's Commentary. 5 Luke i5 Ixff . 

Ill , 



Jesus and Life 

are not interested in theology or in abstract problems 
They are interested in Jesus, in the needs of them- 
selves and those they love. Their religion is in 
large measure a sense of personal indebtedness. 

In hardly any case do we know what became 
of the men on whom, Jesus worked miracles. But 
we know what became of some of the women: they 
served. The women who supplied the material needs 
of the disciple circle when they were not being other- 
wise entertained were women who owed to Him the 
recovery of their health. 1 Among them was Mary 
Magdalene whose love was only the measure of her 
debt, for she had been cured of some overmastering 
disease which seemed to the superstitious onlookers 
the work of seven devils. There is a reminiscence of the 
healing on the Resurrection morning, when the 
word " Mary " brought recognition, as once a word in 
the same voice had brought peace to her tortured 
mind. * 

Mediaeval chivalry might have been a loftier 
institution than it was, had it studied the Gospels 
more. Jesus was the champion, not of a class of 
women but of all women who needed help. He 
fought the battles of the women who brought their 
children for Him to touch,3 of the repentant woman 
of the city,4 of the woman taken in adultery,5 of 
the woman who anointed Him for His burial. 6 Not 
one of the women who come face to face with Jesus 
is held up for disapprobation, not one is harshly 

1 Luke 8**. * John 2016. 3 Mark io^ff. 

4 Luke 736s. 5 John 8&. 6 Mark 143^. 

112 



The Women of the Gospel Story 

spoken to. The contemptuous expression He uses 
to the Syrophcenician 1 of the race to which she 
belonged was evidently accompanied by a tone or 
expression of countenance which took the place of 
inverted commas round the objectionable word. In 
His treatment of women there is no counterpart 
to the bitter attack on the Scribes and Pharisees. 
No woman turns away from Jesus as the rich 
ruler turned away ; but Jesus calls to mind a 
woman, richer and greater than the rich young 
ruler, who had come from the ends of the earth 
to hear the wisdom of one less than Himself. 2 Jesus 
singles out women oftener .than men for special 
praise; and the faith or devotion of a poor widow, an 
out-cast or a Gentile, is as welcome as the service of 
the wife of a court official. 

On the way to J aims' daughter, though she was 
dying, or already dead, if we may trust Matthew, 
He had yet time to listen to a poor woman's story.3 
And with what perfect art is the woman drawn in a 
word or two : the invalid outlook of her long weakness 
and pain, her modesty and shrinking shyness, the 
touch of superstition, her genuine faith, her new- 
found hope and joy, her gratitude. 

It used to be said that Jesus constantly practised 
the principle of "accommodation/' adapting His 
language to the intelligence and knowledge of His 
hearers. In one important respect it would be as 
near the truth to say that He steadily refused to 
" accommodate " Himself to His audience. He con- 

1 Mark 7*7. * Matt. i24». 3 Mark 5*5^. 

113 

8 



Jesus and Life 

tinued to use figurative language in spite of the 
constant misunderstandings to which it led. His 
figures are worthy of their lessons, and people must 
wrestle with them till they do understand. Once 
He met one who had the wit to talk with Him in 
His own language, a woman. Speaking to the Syro- 
phoenician He called her people " dogs," the regular 
Jewish term. She took up the picture and completed 
it : even the dog may have his place in the family 
life. 1 Once more the picture had become an argu- 
ment and it was the penetration no less than the 
faith that won the heart of Jesus. 

Judging from our experience in India and else- 
where we should have imagined that the women of 
the Pharisaic class would have formed the back- 
bone of the opposition to Jesus. So far as our records 
go, there is no indication that this was so. No 
woman, so far as we know, had any part, direct or 
indirect, in the crucifixion, and Matthew tells us 
that Pilate's wife tried to save Jesus.* Women, 
as has been said, were last at the cross, first at the 
tomb on the Resurrection morning. 

The women of Gospel story have no " common 
sense, " no capacity for recognising facts, no financial 
genius. When there was a large crowd to be catered 
for, it was one of the apostles that worked out the sum 
showing what the cost would be:3 As it turned out 
the sum was wrong. It was the disciples who had 
the forethought to protect Jesus from annoyance by 
the women who brought their children.4 The 

« Mark 7*8. * Matt. 27 1 *. J John 67. 4 Mark io*!. 

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The Women of the Gospel Story 

widow who threw into the temple treasury the 
halfpenny that made all her earthly wealth had 
apparently no son to guide her.* 

When the woman in Simon's house broke the flask 
of costly ointment and poured it over Jesus' head, it 
was left to the practical disciples to point out the 
economic waste involved and the ever present claims 
of the Poor Fund.* To the woman the Master she 
loved — to whom instinct told her she could not much 
longer show her love — made a far more powerful appeal 
than the claims of any fund. On the Resurrection 
morning the two Marys and Salome went to the tomb. 3 

They knew there was a huge stone in front of it ; 
they did not know who would remove it for them ; 
they had made no arrangement to have it removed ; 
yet they went on. When they came to tell of the 
angels' message, the level-headed apostles assumed 
that their story was the raving of unstrung women. 
Are the "practical " women of the modern Church 
in the truest line of the apostolical succession of 
women ? 

In His account of the horrors of the last days, Jesus 
has a thought for the sufferings of pregnant and 
nursing women,4 and nineteen hundred years later 
we too, if we have not yet learned Jesus' sympathy 
for them, have at least begun to recognise that it 
is not sound economic policy to let such women 
continue to take their places in the ranks of our 
industrial army. 

There is one aspect of the relations between men 

1 Mark I24»ff. * Matt. 26 s ff . 3 Mark 16 1 . 4 Mark 13*7. 

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Jesus and Life 

and women in which the word equality has a meaning. 
In the story at the beginning of the eighth chapter 
of John, the Pharisees bring to Jesus the woman 
only. Jesus reminds them that this sin is not con- 
fined to women. He knows nothing of various shades 
of social purity. Sociologists point out that trans- 
gression on the part of women has far more serious 
consequences for family life than laxity on the part 
of men. But if a man forgets his manhood, 
has that no consequences for family life ? Jesus 
has high thoughts of men as well as of women, far 
too high thoughts to allow that man can ever in any 
relation of his life be simply an animal. 

Jesus raises the level of the whole subject almost 
as much by what He leaves unsaid as by what He says. 
As Dr. Glover reminds us, Jesus never warns men 
against women. Nor does He warn women against 
men ; but He warns men against themselves. He 
would check the evil at its source. Jesus would not 
have women wronged even in thought ; for the 
unchaste look is not only a shame to the man but an 
insult to the woman. But in this matter as in all 
others, women have their honour largely in their own 
hands. It is theirs to abstain from everything in 
dress and behaviour, and in their choice of com- 
panions, that will expose them to this subtle form 
of insult. 

Onc^ we do see Jesus in a home scene, 1 in the 
home of Martha and Mary — perhaps after His 
ministry began, the nearest approach to a home 

1 Luke io3 8ff . 

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The Women of the Gospel Story 

that He had. Once in the same scene He has to 
rebuke a . woman, if we can call His gentle 
reminder a rebuke. We are commonly told 
that Martha represents the spirit of service, Mary 
the spirit of devotion. Perhaps that is hardly fair 
to either sister. For Martha's complaint implies 
that Mary usually did her share of the domestic work, 
and if Martha had not the spirit of devotion, why 
did she invite Jesus to be her guest ? 

In His answer to Martha's appeal Jesus does not 
even say that the part which Mary had chosen was 
better ; nor that Martha was wrong in her choice ; 
and He who notes every cup- of cold water given to a 
disciple would never let word or tone suggest that He 
was ungrateful for Martha's kindness. Yet rebuke, 
however gentle and courteous, is implied. What was 
Martha's fault ? Certainly not her hospitality, 
not her work and loving service ; nor was Mary 
praised for her idleness. Absence of service is not 
devotion. Nor is Martha blamed for extravagance. 
There is a place in the Christian life for costly service. 

Martha has decided that for that evening at least 
her sphere of work is the kitchen ; no one has inter- 
fered with her decision. She has decided the scale on 
which the entertainment has to take place and again 
she has her way. But Martha claims the right to 
decide Mary's sphere of work as well as her own, and 
it is then as always that the trouble begins. If 
Martha's judgment of Mary's conduct were correct, 
it was a sister's duty to hide the selfishness, not to 
call attention to it. Martha's distracted effort to 

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Jesus and Life 

do justice to the occasion has had its natural sequel 
in loss of self-control. _ Forgetting the courtesy due 
from hostess to guest and from disciple to Master, she 
even reprimands Jesus. 

The point of the story is that Jesus was speaking 
and had at least one eager listener. Martha was 
not listening, and it may be that her estimate of 
where her own duty lay was j ust. But in her j udgment 
it was more important that Jesus should get a sump- 
tuous meal than that Mary should hear His teaching. 
Hospitality usually most welcome may become em- 
barrassing. No gentleman wishes to receive hospit- 
ality that severely taxes the physical or financial 
resources of his hostess, and true hospitality is never 
so absorbed in its own preparatives as to forget tnat 
life has other claims. 

Service is not contrasted with devotion ; provision 
for the supply of homely needs is not depreciated 
in comparison with prayer or Bible study. But 
we are reminded that we are responsible for our own 
choice of work, not for our neighbour's ; and the 
spirit that serves at the wrong time is compared with 
the spirit that recognises that there is a time to serve 
and a time to listen. The time to listen is when Jesus 
speaks. Even in the most solemn moment of our 
lives, are there not voices that break in and call us 
to service, it may be vain and meaningless service, 
almost before the Master has begun to speak ? 



118 



CHAPTER XI 

Marriage and Divorce 

In connection with our .Lord's teaching on woman- 
hood, the subject of marriage and divorce has an 
important place. In discussing the question it is 
imperative to keep in mind our Lord's method of 
teaching. His instruction on institutions largely 
took the form of insight into the nature and meaning 
of these institutions. He made large demands on 
the intelligence of His disciples. He did not speak 
as a Professor of Law, or even of Ethics : His work 
was inspiration and illumination. He emphasised 
central and guiding principles and was not careful 
to point out exceptions and conditions which disciples 
who understood the nature of the institution they 
were discussing could find out for themselves. 

In Deuteronomy xxi v. i, a man is permitted to 
divorce his wife in prescribed form if he have found 
in her some unseemly thing. The precise meaning 
of this phrase was a favourite subject of dispute in 
the Rabbinic schools. The stricter school under- 
stood it to mean only adultery. The laxer school made 
it cover practically every form of domestic unhappi- 
ness, including bad cookery. The point was brought 
to Jesus as a test question. 1 

1 Mark io*", el. Matt. 19!^. 
119 



Jesus and Life 

Jesus asks His Pharisaic questioners to cease to 
look at the matter as a knotty point of law, suitable 
for the exercise of their skill in legal quibbles. He 
brings them out from the heated atmosphere of con- 
troversy into God's cool clear air, where they may think 
bigger and cleaner thoughts. He invites them to 
consider the meaning of marriage, the purpose for 
which it was instituted. 

In human life as constituted by God there is a 
difference of sex which is fundamental, " from the 
beginning.' ' There is the male nature and there is 
the female nature, each needing the other, each in 
complete without the other. There must then be 
a union. Of all possible forms of union, what 
form is most in accordance with God's purpose 
for the world ? In the only form of society which 
Jesus considers, the boy as he grows up finds him- 
self a member of a family, in which father, mother, 
and children live together in an abiding union. 
When the family life has completed its work,, or an 
important part of its work, in the training of the 
children, they are then free to leave the home, with 
a view to form other homes of the nature of that 
they have left. The man leaves his father and mother 
and forms a new relationship with his wife, of the 
same permanent nature as his relation to the father 
and mother he has left. 

From Jesus' whole conception of manhood and 
womanhood we infer that in marriage as He pictures 
it the physical union is only the completion of the in- 
tellectual and moral comradeship which is its only 

120 



Marriage and Divorce 

sanction. Yet Jesus emphasises the physical union, 
and this is important. One may gain an appearance 
of spirituality by dwelling on the marriage re- 
lationship as a union of souls and ignoring its other 
aspects. But the loftiness of this view is only super- 
ficial. If the essence of the marriage relationship is 
a spiritual union, then where there is no spiritual 
union, or where the spiritual union which once 
existed exists no longer, there is no marriage. 

But this is the teaching neither of Jesus nor of 
the facts of life, only of the sentimental novelist. 
It is part of the greatness of the apostle Paul 
that while his head is in the clouds his feet are always 
firmly planted on solid earth, not least when discuss- 
ing this same subject. And this combination of 
idealism with recognition of fact is in the very spirit 
of his Master. Where husband and wife are not of 
one mind and one soul, there is no Christian marriage ; 
but multitudes of people who are not Christians have 
to live their lives and make the best of them. The 
son in the far country is still a son, even though for 
the time he has no filial feeling ; and husband and 
wife are still husband and wife, even though they 
have lost or never had that mutual love and res- 
pect without which marriage is little more than 
mating. 

In our relations with non-Christians it is especially 
important to emphasise the distinction between 
marriage and Christian marriage. The former is 
concerned with status and is a matter of law. The 
latter is concerned with feeling and is in the region 

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Jesus and Life 

of the spirit. Of the many marriage problems 
which beset Christians in their relations with 
non-Christians, no solution can be considered Christ- 
ian which is based on the assumption that a marriage 
which contradicts no fundamental law of human 
nature is no marriage because it was contracted 
under " heathen " rites. 

The passage must be taken in close connection 
with the scene which follows, both in Mark and 
Matthew, in which Jesus blesses the children. The 
innocent children are introduced partly as a foil 
to the lustful Pharisees seeking facile divorce. Jesus 
reminds them that the real question is not divorce 
but marriage, the real problem not how to get rid 
of the relationship but how to make it the abiding, 
life-giving thing that God meant it to be. In the 
presence 01 the children we cannot forget that marriage 
brings its responsibilities, that children who have 
been brought up in a house with a man and woman 
are poor creatures compared with children who 
have been nurtured in a home with father and mother. 
We must make our marriage laws with our eyes on 
the children in the arms of Jesus. And He who 
championed the cause of all sufferers would not 
forget that women will always suffer more than men 
from facile divorce. 

To the question about divorce, then, Jesus' answer 
is an exposition of the nature of marriage. Marriage 
is an institution, ordained by God in the very nature 
of His children, in which a man and woman, each the 
complement of the other, join in a permanent union 

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Marriage and Divorce 

to form a home. Some concern has been caused 
because in Mark's account Jesus seems to allow no 
possibility of divorce, while in Matthew He mentions 
adultery as a possible justification for divorce. It 
is highly probable that Mark's account is correct ; 
partly because it is earlier than Matthew's, but chiefly 
because it is more in accordance with Jesus' method 
of teaching to state the. principle absolutely. 

Having shown the nature of marriage, there was 
no need to specify that adultery gave solid ground 
for divorce, Where there is adultery the marriage 
tie in its essence is already broken. The sentence of 
divorce pronounced by the. law-court is simply a 
legal recognition of an accomplished fact. The ques- 
tion whether other grounds than adultery can justify 
divorce or even make divorce a duty is not, as has so 
often been supposed, a question for the Biblical 
exegete, but for the Christian statesman. If there is 
one case where the sanctity of marriage can be upheld 
only by the severance of the marriage tie, there may be 
others. Jesus' teaching on marriage must be taken 
in conjunction with all His other teaching, with His 
abhorrence of cruelty to the weak, and with His 
whole attitude to women. 

According to the teaching of Jesus marriage is 
a union; but a juxtaposition in which the primary 
rights of one party are denied is not a union. This 
is not the place to discuss details of the subject, 
and we do not forget that the hardships of virtue 
are no argument for lenity to vice ; but we must be- 
ware of cruelty masquerading in the guise of orthodox 

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Jesus and Life 

exegesis. In writing to the Corinthian Church 
Paul quotes Jesus' declaration about the permanence 
of the marriage tie, but then proceeds to treat 
particular cases as a matter for discussion. 1 

Jesus, we repeat, came not to give law but to give 
light. We have from His lips no reasoned discussion 
of the question of divorce. But He made it abund- 
antly clear that He conceived marriage as a perma- 
nent union between man and wife ; from which it 
is a reasonable inference that a law-court cannot 
divorce a man from his wife ; it can only give legal 
sanction to a divorce which has already taken place. 
Jesus emphasises the permanence of the. marriage 
bond, not only by reminding us of the essential 
nature of the institution as a divine ordinance, but 
also by setting His face against one particular way 
of breaking it : the voluntary and deliberate putting 
away of a wife by her husband, especially the 
putting away of a wife with a view to marry 
another. A husband or a wife can no more dissolve 
an uncongenial partnership by divorce than a father 
can terminate his relationship to an unfilial son by 
disowning him. Marriage is not only a convenience 
but an education and a calling. Husband and wife 
have the duty of " saving " each other, saving 
each other for human love as well as for the love 
of God. In ill-considered marriages the task that 
one or. both partners have thus unwittingly under- 
taken may seem hard ; but with Jesus the difficulty 
of a duty was never a reason for shirking it. 
» i Cor. 7"fl. 
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Marriage and Divorce 

Remarriage after a divorce due either to lust or 
cowardice Jesus does not hesitate to call by its 
proper name. A Christian partner in a marriage 
can under no circumstances break the marriage 
tie. Does that prevent him or her from recognising 
when it has already been effectively broken ? 

Divorce which is of the nature of a major surgical 
operation is a violent remedy for an unhealthy con- 
dition of the social organism. We need surgeons to 
deal with our failures, but our hope for the future 
is in the science of preventive medicine. To 
imagine that when we have made stringent divorce 
laws we have done our whole duty by the teaching 
of Jesus on this subject is to make the old mistake 
of the legalist. If Jesus, interpreting the mind 
of God, declared marriage to be essentially a 
permanent institution, then it behoves all followers 
of Jesus to seek to suppress or transform all those 
features of our social or economic life which militate 
against the permanence of marriage. 

There are marriages which for physical reasons 
ought not to take place at all. There has been in 
the past a social convention which made it difficult 
for a young man and woman to know each other 
without being committed to each other, a convention 
which has by no means lost all its power. Without 
being a convert to eugenics one may fairly doubt 
whether the almost absolutely irresponsible way in 
which marriage may be and is entered on in our 
country is best for the state or for the individual 
home. Drink is the foe of marriage as of every other 

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Jesus and Life 

beneficent institution. Economic systems and 
systems of housing which make decent and happy 
homes impossible or all but impossible must be 
reckoned among forces hostile to Christian marriage. 
But on this question, as on every other question 
connected with life, we are brought back to the fact 
that the problem is ultimately personal, that the 
most effective weapon of social reform is the bringing 
of the minds of men and women under the dominance 
of the Christian impulse. 

In the discussion on marriage the Jews bring for- 
ward the permission of divorce by Moses, either spon- 
taneously as in Matthew, or in reply to a question 
of Jesus as in Mark. Jesus points out that this 
permission was a concession to the " hardness of their 
hearts," a concession contrary to God's eternal 
purpose in the institution of marriage. There are 
two possibilities. It may be that Jesus is condemn- 
ing Moses for weakly yielding a point he had no right 
to yield, and implying that all who had taken ad- 
vantage of this concession of Moses were living in sin. 
But this would be contrary to Jesus' general attitude 
to Moses. 

It is commonly said that in the fifth chapter of 
Matthew Jesus freely criticises Moses ; but this is 
hardly correct. Rather He recognises the difference 
in function between Moses and Himself. Moses was 
legislating for a state. The state can take cogni- 
sance of acts and institutions, not of feelings and 
motives. The state can deal with murder but not 
with anger, with unchastity but not with unchaste 

126 



Marriage and Divorce 

thoughts, with breach of contract but not with 
lying. The state may say " Thou shalt not covet " 
or " Love your neighbour," but even a theocratic 
state has no power to enforce such legislation. But 
Jesus came to inspire with ideals the spiritual society 
of His followers. The law of Moses, like the law of 
a modern state, dealt not with marriage as a spiritual 
institution, but with its physical and legal aspects. 
No state can take cognisance of the presence or 
absence of love or congruity of tastes between husband 
and wife. 

Further the state must legislate not only for people 
with ideals but for all its members, including those 
whose hearts are " hard." It must therefore often be 
content with compromise and second-best. It 
must wink at smaller evils to prevent grosser evils, 
as Moses sanctioned or was supposed to have sanc- 
tioned facile divorce to prevent indiscriminate vice. 
The state therefore must vary its demands according 
as the moral and intellectual condition of its citizens 
varies. Evils that have to be tolerated among a 
rough nomad people may be condemned in later 
and more cultured centuries. 

Jesus then teaches that the permanence of the 
marriage relation is and always has been the ideal ; 
but it seems a reasonable inference from His teaching 
taken as a whole : first, that cases may arise where 
the continuation of the marriage bond would be a 
desecration of marriage ; and secondly, that this 
permanence is an ideal to be reached only gradually 
as civilisation and culture advance. 

127 , 



Jesus and Life 

This second point is important in the Mission work 
of the Church. It was no accident that Jesus was not 
given to the Jews at the time of Moses or till after 
they had come under the influence of Persian, Greek, 
and Roman culture. Till then they would not have 
been ready for the Christ. The Church in its Mission 
work is in contact with peoples at various stages 
of civilisation, some of them at a far more primitive 
stage than the Israelites of Moses' time. What is 
to take the place in their lives of the long period of 
preparation that God gave to the Israelites ? Some 
tell us that the Ethiopian will never change his skin. 
Others expect heathen people to leap at one bound 
a gulf as broad as that for the crossing of which God 
allowed the Israelites many centuries. In the 
Christian realm an unbalanced faith is always more 
likely to be near the truth of things than an unre- 
lieved pessimism, however the latter may build 
on experience ; but the educative and saving power 
of Jesus on backward peoples will be most effectively 
exercised through His Church, when the Church 
combines infinite patience, sympathy and forgiving 
love, with the unfailing presentation of Christian 
ideals enforced by Christian discipline, and with a 
faith and hope that expect miracles. 

If any disappointment is felt that Jesus in His 
teaching on marriage does not reach even higher 
levels, .we have to note that He is not speaking of 
specifically Christian marriage. He is speaking to 
Pharisees, and presenting the Divine purpose in 
marriage in so far as it can be applied and enforced 

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Marriage and Divorce 

in all states that have reached the intellectual and 
moral level of the Jews of that period. It is true 
that similar teaching is given in what is called the 
" Sermon on the Mount," which is addressed to 
" the disciples/' 1 but this is presumably the same 
saying which Matthew after his wont has included 
in a congruous collection of sayings. This is es- 
pecially obvious in Luke's Gospel where the dictum on 
adultery, in spite of the valiant attempts made to 
connect it with the context, is simply an isolated 
utterance.* But Dr. Newman Smyth is only adding 
a corollary to the teaching of Jesus when he says 
that " married life reaches- towards its supreme 
perfection when one Christian faith and hope become 
the spirit and the law of a human home."3 

Jesus teaches then that the nature of man or 
woman apart from marriage remains incomplete ; 
the celibate life is essentially the immature life. 
In Matthew's account after the discussion on divorce 
there is a short passage on celibacy4 ; but the section 
reads so awkwardly in the connection in which 
Matthew gives it that it is perhaps safe to assume 
we have lost the context and there is no correspond- 
ing section in Mark or Luke. 

In this section Jesus reminds the disciples that 
although marriage is a Divine ordinance it is not 
always practicable: there may be barriers of three 
kinds. Some are disqualified by considerations of 
health. Others are prevented from marrying " by 

i Matt. 5i». * Luke 16*8. 

3 " Christian Ethics/' p. 407. 4 Matt. 19*°**. 

129 * 



Jesus and Life 

men," for example by rates of wages that make 
Christian marriage impossible, or by the failure of 
the responsible authorities to provide a sufficient 
supply of suitable houses. In other circles the most 
potent influence hostile to marriage is the absurdly 
high " standard of living/' which has sometimes been 
ascribed to the " race for pleasure/' but might be 
more justly attributed to a restless craving to be 
doing something expensive combined with fear of 
ostracism from the caste. So long as competition 
in dress and entertainments, a large establishment, 
and costly amusements are the hall-mark of our 
Brahmins, so long will wealthy men tell- us quite 
sincerely that they are too poor to marry. Neither 
sex can afford to lay the blame on the other ; but in 
so far as women are responsible for the orgies of 
extravagance, they make their sisters pay a heavy 
price. 

A third class voluntarily deprive themselves of 
marriage " for the sake of the kingdom of heaven/ ' 
the better to fulfil their duty to parents or relatives 
who need them, or to devote themselves more whole- 
heartedly and unreservedly to religious or philan- 
thropic work, to art or science. Such people have 
not entered a state higher than the marriage state. 
They have recognised that the many-sided develop- 
ment of their own individual lives is not for them 
the highest good : they have plucked out an eye 
that others may see, cut off a hand that others may 
be strong to work. 

The home as Jesus pictures it is a home in which 

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Marriage and Divorce 

there are children. " Let the children come to Me ; M » 
but how can they come if they do not exist ? "Do 
not prevent them " « : but we have prevented them. 
The laughter of God is the laughter of bitter irony. 
For a generation the nations in the van of progress 
have watched their homes becoming fewer and fewer, 
those that existed becoming emptier and emptier, 
and men and women rejoiced in their new found 
liberty and independence and prosperity. And 
then, not as in Noah's time when they were marrying 
and being married, but when they were refusing to 
marry or to accept the obligations of marriage, the 
deluge came. In hot haste' they searched the high- 
ways and by-ways for men, and still more men, 
for the men whose non-existence was a triumph of 
the new and popular school of economics. 

If the neo-Malthusian will not allow the Psalmist's 
claim that " the man who has filled his quiver full 
of sons " is " happy," 2 he must at least grant that 
he has one advantage : 

" He shall not be ashamed when he speaks 
With enemies in the gate/ '3 

With his strong sons behind him his word will have 
weight. Small nations have played big parts in 
the history of the world ; but a nation which has 
chosen to be small can only wait and see how God 
deals with the policy. 

Imprudent marriages and imprudence in marriage 
have caused untold misery ; but if our reading of 

1 Mark iom. * Ps. 1275. 3 Ps. 1275. 

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Jesus and Life 

the Gospels is correct, economy must take a very 
humble place among the Christian virtues. 

" One man is generous, yet grows ever richer ; 
Another is mean, yet he only grows poorer/' 1 

For one who loves children, tries to look at them 
with the eyes of Jesus, feels his nature unfold under 
their influence, who will work out a profit and loss 
account ? Work, care, anxiety, sleeplessness, 
expenditure, shall we put them all down on the debit 
side ? Neo-Malthusianism, like most moral products, 
is a mixed growth. In some measure it is due to a 
genuine desire that children should have a happy child- 
hood and should enter life with the best equipment 
the parents can afford. In so far as this is its origin, 
its value is a question of fact : the question namely 
whether in experience the physical, intellectual, 
and moral worth and the happiness of children 
is in inverse proportion to the size of the family ; 
and whether the value of the different forms of 
culture is in proportion to the money spent on them. 
In part it is a recognition of the fact that the wife 
and mother is also a woman with her own life to live 
and the worth of her judgment will depend on the 
extent to which she has been trained, and is willing, 
to give to all the elements in life their Christian 
values. 

But if our forefathers took somewhat too literally 
the precept to " give no thought to the morrow," 
our temptation is to give too much thought to the 

1 Proverbs n*4. 
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Marriage and Divorce 

day. The new economic doctrine is ultimately a 
new way of looking at life, a new determination to get 
the most out of life, a change in the spiritual centre of 
gravity. The new spirit does not abjure self-sac- 
rifice, but is convinced that previous generations 
bore many burdens and imposed man}' burdens 
on others that God never meant them to bear, and 
carefully scrutinises . the claims of every cross 
before it shoulders it. How far is the new spirit 
Christian ? 



133 



CHAPTER XII 

The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

For thousands of years philosophers have tried 
to find some formula which will cover the end towards 
which the moral life ought to be developed. In spite 
of our own experience, we are apt to forget that the 
moral aims men profess to follow are at best but 
ideals to which in their practical lives they approx- 
imate more or less closely ; that while most men are 
worse than their creed, many men are better than 
their creed ; and that not infrequently the spectator 
can see no relation between the life a man actually 
lives and the scheme of life he thinks he is following. 
In theory most of us belong to some ethical 
" school. " In practice we find room in the guidance 
of our lives for the ideals of more than one school. 

One would have supposed that whatever differences 
there might be on other aspects of Christian truth 
or conduct, there would at least be unanimity on 
the moral end of the Christian life : but in fact the 
Christian Church has room even now for two ideals 
which at first sight seem contradictory of each other. 
Asceticism, which for centuries dominated the minds 
if not of Christians at least of the professionals of 
the Church, still remains a living ideal ; to many 

134 



The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

Christianity is still the pursuit of the empty 
life. The devotees of this school are suspicious of 
pleasure, have no interest in the cultivation of 
faculties for its own sake, and regard the world 
as on the whole an enemy to be feared. They 
glory in renunciation, and measure their progress 
in the Christian race by their success in emptying 
life of every interest not in the narrow sense spiritual. 

But in our generation even among loyal followers 
of Jesus, there has been an increasing demand for the 
full life. With a human life so rich in potentialities, 
a world so varied in its capacity to satisfy our desires 
and give scope for the exercise of our powers, why 
should we, men are asking, place an impassable 
gulf between them ? What God hath joined together 
let not man put asunder. God has made His world 
and man's life for each other ; why should we think 
we honour God by divorcing them ? Surely our 
eyes were given us for some better purpose than 
to pluck them out, our hands for some nobler end 
than to be cut off ! there is an increasing suspicion 
that the old insistent demand for self-sacrifice is 
but a refined form of devil worship, that the God 
whom the mediaeval Christian worshipped was 
one who loved to see His worshippers grinning with 
pain. 

It would be grossly unfair to apply the term 
materialistic to the scheme of life which finds Greek 
ideals not incompatible with devotion to Jesus. 
A large section of the Church during the last century 
has shown generous hospitality to wide culture, 

135 



Jesus and Life 

and even to a certain amount of Hedonism ; yet 
the same period has been marked by an all but 
unexampled outburst of missionary activity and a 
rapid growth of the leavening power of Christianity 
in the social and political life. 

Nor is the revolt against asceticism essentially 
selfish or self-centred. It is organically connected 
with the growth in the last century and a half of 
physical science and invention with our new know- 
ledge of and control over the forces of nature. We 
have learned that the world is a far richer place 
than our forefathers supposed it to be ; that in it are 
multitudinous secrets concealed from the foundation 
of the world, only waiting for men to fathom them, 
unmeasured powers waiting for men to harness them, 
infinite sources of refined enjoyment for those who 
will take the trouble to appreciate them. Our 
marvellous century has taught us that the motto of 
the world is : The asker receives ; the seeker 
finds ; to the knocker the door opens. The work- 
man of to-day has in many respects a far more com- 
fortable and refined and a far fuller life than the 
magnate of some centuries back. 

And not only is the world a better place to live in 
but man himself is a far bigger creature than he 
used to consider himself, wielding for the first time 
with the authority of conscious power the sceptre of 
his dominion over the world and all that is in the 
world, and with hints in his nature of whole regions 
as yet uncharted. 

All this was bound to influence our conception 

136 






The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

of the end of the moral life. It was all very well to 
despise a world which seemed despicable, a dreary 
poor inhospitable abode, not inaptly compared to 
the desert of Israelitish wanderings. When man, 
not half conscious of himself, found himself living in 
a world he did not understand, but which seemed to be 
largely controlled by unknown powers that were 
hostile to him, there was little wonder that he concen 
trated his hopes on another life than this. But 
with our new knowledge of and mastery over the world, 
and our new conception of man, all that is changed ; 
and it is not strange that many are finding life abund- 
antly worth living and cultivating faculties that 
seem abundantly worth cultivating. It is their creed 
that the land of Bondage is itself the land of Promise, 
to be reached not by wandering through a desert 
but by turning their task masters into bond servants. 
The goals of what we have called the full life and the 
empty life do not, except in a minor degree, represent 
two classes of Christians. Rather they represent 
ideals which most of us manage to combine in our 
lives in a way which puzzles ourselves at times 
as much as it puzzles others. There are some who 
frankly strive to meet life at all points and regard self- 
sacrifice as an uncomfortable doctrine of which 
too much has been made. Others try more or less 
successfully to suppress themselves in the service 
of others. But for most of us the moral life is a 
succession of balancing feats on a tight rope stretched 
between the two extremes, with our faces now towards 
this goal, now towards that ; and to many the 

T 37. 



Jesus and Life 

ascetic element in their Christianity makes itself 
felt not so much in any direct effect on their conduct, 
as in a vague sense of dissatisfaction ; a feeling that 
they are happier than pious people have any right 
to be ; perhaps even a certain relief that they can 
call themselves " miserable offenders " with a clear 
conscience. 

The two types of life may be roughly illustrated 
by the different ideals which bodies like the Salvation 
Army on the one side and most churches on the other 
have for their official representatives. A clergyman 
may not always be able to make his home a model 
of hospitality and a centre of intellectual and aes- 
thetic culture as well as of spiritual influence, but 
that is the standard his people set up for him. A 
preacher who took the Baptist as his model might 
find his sphere as an itinerant evangelist, but would 
have difficulty in " taking orders " or " getting a call." 

The ambiguity and puzzled uncertainty of aim 
that are so common to-day are a reflex of the existence 
in New Testament teaching of two elements which 
at first seem irreconcilable. On the one hand we 
have the cross as the universally recognised symbol 
of Christianity. The Gospel of the Kingdom from 
the first involved renunciation : Simon and Andrew 
left their work when Jesus called them,i James and 
John left their father and their work.* The Gospel 
call is a call to pluck out a right eye,3 to sell our possess- 
ions^ to abandon the most pressing domestic duties, 5 

1 Mark i*8. * Mark i™. 3 Matt. 5*9. 

4 Luke 1233. 5 Luke q$9^. 

138 



The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

to break the dearest family ties, 1 to face pain and 
shame and death.* Jesus had sometimes no place 
to lay His head. 3 

But over against all this is a quite different atti- 
tude to life. Jesus attends feasts, 4 is a guest at a 
wedding,5 has joyous intercourse with men. His 
Gospel is " new wine/' 6 the Kingdom is a wedding 
feasts He fears to meet no man or woman : the 
touch of the unclean defiled the Pharisee ; the 
touch of Jesus made the unclean clean. 8 He found 
the Sabbath a burden ; He changed it into a day 
of rest and glad worship. The men of Israel trying 
to keep the law imposed by their priests suggested 
to Jesus a yoke of bullocks stumbling along with 
hatred in their hearts under a crushing load. The 
followers of Jesus are also called to take the yoke, 
but they pull with all their hearts a burden that 
seems light, because the Master who guides them is 
one who loves them and whom they love. 9 Most 
significant of all, Jesus deliberately contrasts His 
own way of life with the asceticism of the Baptist. 
His readiness to enjoy life's good things had given, 
He tells us, a handle to His enemies, who accused 
Him of gluttony and drunkenness. 10 

The instructions to the twelve" and to the seventy" 
for their missionary tours have sometimes been under- 
stood in an ascetic sense, but perhaps with insufficient 



1 Luke 14*6. 


* Mark 834^ 


3 Luke 958. 


4 Mark 2 J 5 ; Luke 736. 


5 John 2*. 


6 Mark 2". 


7 Matt. 22*. 


8 Mark 14**. 


9 Matt. na*ff. 


" Matt in". 


" Matt. 10. 
139 


m Luke 10. 



Jesus atid Life 

reason. They seem rather to be intended to in- 
culcate, in part faith, in part haste. There may be 
an intentional contrast with the greedy and comfort- 
loving Scribes and Pharisees ; but the main purport 
of the instructions seems to be that the disciples 
are to avoid the two extremes of a faithless inde- 
pendence and a cringing beggary. They are to go 
among the villages of Galilee as men who bring some- 
thing that is worth having, and are to fare at 
least as well as the people among whom they are 
working. 

It is an easy, but for our day not a very profitable 
task to expose the weakness of asceticism. Its 
philosophy of life is wrong : it is Christian teaching 
that the world is not Satan's world but God's 
world. Sin is usually associated with pleasure of 
some kind, but it is a confusion of thought to sup- 
pose that the pleasure is itself sinful ; rather pleasure 
is a God-given concomitant of all healthy activity. 
Even if flight from temptation is sometimes the truest 
courage, for many it is not a possible means of es- 
cape ; and those lose the stimulus they might have 
from a victorious struggle. 

The ascetic sets himself an impossible task, for 
his chief enemy is within the gates. We abandon 
our money only to find that we have retained our 
greed. Desire does not disappear with the means of 
satisfying it. We conquer our ambition to be famous 
for our " secular " achievements, and find, or perhaps 
more often we do not find, that we cherish the 
desire to be famous for our piety. The very means 

140 



The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

we take to reach our end is the most effective guaran- 
tee that we shall never reach it. Desire never speaks 
so loudly as when we suppress it. The man whose 
life resolves itself into an overmastering passion for 
a draught of water is not the peasant whose home is 
by the running stream, but the lost traveller in the 
desert. Even if the ascetic could ever reach his goal, 
it is a poor ambition. ■ Better to enter into life 
maimed or lame or one-eyed than with the full 
tally of eyes and limbs to lose life altogether ; but 
better still, every organ sound, every faculty 
developed, to enter into life. 

The ascetic fears the world, the Christian fears only 
himself. With the seductions of the world in full 
view, knowing all the lust and littleness and cruelty 
of men, Jesus bids His followers go into all the 
world. The ascetic asks what harm the world can 
do to him : the Christian asks what good he can do 
to the world. 

It is all true ; and yet asceticism, even when it 
savours of absurdity, always makes its appeal. A 
Laodicean world will always pay a tribute of respect 
to earnestness, however unenlightened. There is 
a Satan in each of us that is sceptical of a piety 
that leads to " seven thousand sheep, three thousand 
camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five-hundred she- 
asses, and a vast train of servants," and which is 
consistent with being " the richest man in all the 
East/' The teacher whose religion is manifestly 
costing him something is the teacher who will have 
disciples. When Jesus was analysing the spell 

141 . 



Jesus and Life 

which the Baptist cast over the men of his day, 
He traced it in part to his coarse food and clothing 
and his desert life. 1 

Jesus went to feasts: but the Gospel writers 
never mention this as a fact of interest in itself. The 
feast was always a background for some incident 
that illumines Jesus or His message. Among the 
most eloquent passages in Paul's letters are those 
which describe His sufferings for the sake of the 
Gospel. And when men hold up before us an Hell- 
enic gospel of culture and full self-development 
as the truth of Christianity, we do not forget that 
when the time came Jesus died on the cross. 

We are sometimes told that Jesus ignored the 
richness and variety of life, that His concentration 
on religion as the only worthy object of interest 
is narrow and paralysing. The criticism is well taken 
if we grant the underlying assumption that religion 
is but one among many objects of human pursuit, 
intended mainly for those who have a natural bent 
in that direction. But to Jesus religion is the sap 
of the tree of life, not one of its branches. If 
Jesus did not legislate for our moral lives, it was 
hardly to be expected that He would prescribe codes 
for our aesthetic, our intellectual, our industrial 
lives. 

But Jesus has that absolute conviction that 
the world is one, which is the fundamental pre- 
supposition of all science. He has the scientist's 
keen interest in man and man's mind, in the world 

* Matt. n7ff. 
142 



The Full Life or the Empty Life ? 

and its orderliness; the artist's joy in its unending 
beauty ; the philosopher's conviction that there is 
a meaning and purpose in it all, when we penetrate 
the outer show and get down to the reality ; his 
assurance that nature will speak if we ask her ques- 
tions and listen for the answer. 

It is open to anyone to deny that Jesus read 
life aright, to refuse to follow Him when He 
sees the divine heart of love in the glorious colours 
of the lily, the hand of God in the giving or with- 
holding of sunshine or shower ; and when He 
reads history as the gradual unfolding of God's 
purpose. This at least is beyond cavil, that to see 
life and the world as Jesus saw them is to have the 
noblest of all incentives to study them in every 
phase. The intellectual and aesthetic history 
of Europe is the effective answer to those who find 
in the Christian Gospel the barrenness of an abstract 
spirituality. 



143 



CHAPTER XIII 

Pain 

If it is misleading to picture Jesus' ideal for men 
as the closest possible approximation to the con- 
dition of disembodied spirits, it leads us even 
further from the truth to ignore the large place He 
gives to suffering in His teaching. The meaning of 
pain has troubled men's minds since first they began 
to consider life's problems. Among the deepest 
convictions of the Israelite was that the righteous 
man is " like to a tree, planted by runlets of water " x ; 
that the " wicked " are " like chaff," " driven by 
the wind."* Suffering is the fruit of sin. 

But the Israelite could not conceal from himself 
that often it is the wicked man that is like a tree 
planted by a runlet of water. He has his answer 
ready : it will all become clear when we have 
" entered the holy world of God and considered their 
latter end."3 But their latter end is often a credit- 
able demise among sorrowing relatives, an imposing 
funeral, a eulogistic obituary, and a flattering tomb- 
stone.' " Wait a little longer" said the Israel- 
ite. " He has escaped, but his son will bear the 
penalty." " Rabbi, why was this man born blind, 

* PS. IS. » PS. 14. 3 Ps. 73*7. 

144 



Pain 

for his own sin or his parents' ? M « Sin must bring 
suffering in its train ; suffering must be the out- 
come of sin. And the Hindu agrees : if Job is 
really as righteous in this world as he thinks he is, 
then he must have had a black record in his previous 
existence or he would never have known such agonies 
in this. 

In part all this is a natural confusion of thought : 
sin leads to suffering, therefore suffering is due to 
sin. In part it is too " optimistic," if one may use 
the expression. It assumes that the will of God 
is not only the controlling but the only will in the 
universe. It leaves no place for " evil spirits," 
nor for the hostile will of man. Nor does it make 
allowance for that " twist " in nature that corres- 
ponds to the "crook " in man's nature which tries 
to thwart the will of God ; for the subtle harmony 
of nature and man is among the deepest convictions 
of Scripture writers. The ground is " cursed " 
for the sake of man.* " The entire creation sighs 
and throbs with pain "3 in unison with the throes 
of man's agonised efforts after a higher life ; and the 
redemption of nature will synchronise with the 
ultimate redemption of man. The Jew and the 
Hindu forget that to run counter to this element in 
life that is hostile to God will bring pain, as well as 
to withstand God Himself. Blessed they who are 
persecuted for their goodness. 

But in the essence of his conviction the Jew was 
rignt : if the world is God's world and man is God's 

1 John oA 2 Gen. 317. 3 Romans 8", Dr. Moffatt's translation. 

145 

10 



Jesus and Life 

child, ultimately there must be harmony between 
man's spirit and its environment. Ultimately ; 
yet they are separable and for a time they may 
diverge ; for a time they must diverge. If the 
" runlet of water " that runs through the garden 
of the good man never failed, then religion would 
simply be prudence. When Satan is allowed to 
strip Job, it is not only to convince of his sincerity 
that sceptic in man that the author calls Satan, 
not only to convince God, but ultimately to convince 
Job himself. As long as he is a prosperous and 
popular sheikh, not even he himself can tell for certain 
whether his faith in God is a graceful ornament to an 
abounding material prosperity, or whether it is the 
foundation of his being. 

Jesus has several things to tell us about suffering : 
this among other things, that suffering tests us. 
Sometimes God lets the rain come down, floods 
arise and winds blow, on the whole structure of our 
life, to let us see whether our trust in God is part of 
us, or whether it is only an accident of our material 
prosperity and will fall with its fall. 1 

Nothing more shakes men's faith in a guiding 
Providence than the seemingly reckless and useless 
suffering and waste of life involved in catastrophes 
of " nature." Men still challenge God as they 
challenged His Son with the question : To what 
purpose is this waste ?» One of the many surprises 
of the Gospels is the way in which Jesus deals with 
this subject. Eighteen men have been killed by the 

* Matt. 7*4« » Matt. 26*. 

146 



Pain 

fall of a tower in Siloam. How will Jesus deal 
with this situation P 1 

We expect Him to express sympathy with the 
relatives of the victims, to inspire His interlocutors 
with loftier views of death, to reason with them and 
explain how such happenings are not inconsistent 
with a good God whose power is unlimited. He does 
none of these things. " Do you suppose they were 
sinners beyond all men who live in Jerusalem ? No, 
I tell you. But if you do not repent, all of you will 
perish in the same way." It seems harsh ; we are 
repelled : but we read the passage again. 

The men to whom Jesus isr speaking are not rela- 
tives of the victims ; they are in no need of conso- 
lation. Nor are they men whose faith in Providence 
has received a staggering blow ; they believe in God's 
guidance as much as ever they did. They are self- 
righteous men, puffed up with pride at their own im- 
munity from misfortune, testifying as they think it 
does to their spotless innocence, gloating over 
the wickedness which alone could have induced 
God to send these eighteen men to destruction. 
Jesus sees in them that same self-righteous, 
blind, contemptuous Pharisaism that is hurling 
the nation to its doom. He calls on them to see in 
the fate of the eighteen men lying crushed under the 
tower a type of the fate that awaits them and their 
compatriots if they do not turn. Suffering then 
may be a solemn warning of God to others, though 
it can never be only that. 

* Luke 131-1. 
147 



Jesus and Life 

It is characteristic that Jesus hardly refers at all 
to the book of Job. ^The problem of the book was 
for Him no problem. His faith in God was not a 
faith that triumphed over the facts of life that 
lead to scepticism. It was trust in a Father with 
whom He had unbroken communion, to doubt whom 
would be to doubt Himself. Is it not partly because 
we judge God from the outside, as dispassionate 
albeit at times friendly critics, rather than from the 
intimacy of personal communion, that the cries of 
Job's wrestling strike so familiarly on our ears and 
come home to us with such power ? 

In two respects Jesus' attitude to pain differs 
fundamentally from the attitude of much Old Testa- 
ment writing, culminating in the book of Job, 
Job's problem was his own pain : why such a fine 
man as himself should not be allowed to continue 
in undisturbed possession of his estate, his good 
health, and his domestic bliss. But the suffering 
that wrings the heart and makes the foundations of 
our faith to quiver is the pain before which philo- 
sophy is dumb ; the pain that strikes so harshly on 
our sense of chivalry, of which the victims are not 
merely innocent but helpless, weak women, crushed 
invalids, tortured children. 

On this subject Jesus does not reason with us ; 
the cleverest arguments would leave us cold. But 
He makes us feel that our pity for all that is weak 
and suffering is but a dim reflex of the pity in the 
heart of God. He shows us God, not standing out- 
side sorrows like these in indifference, not even in 

148 






Pain 

pity, but so sharing our life that all our pain is His 
pain. God, in the person of His Servant, " carries 
the burden of our sicknesses and pains." 1 He 
seizes the spear-points that threaten His weakest 
brethren, and points them towards His own bosom. 
" So far as you have done it, so far as you have not 
done it, to one of these brothers of Mine, however 
humble, you have done it, you have not done it, to 
Me."* - 

But although Jesus does not quote Job, we cannot 
assume He had not studied the book. The fall of the 
tower at Siloam reminds us that one of the bitterest 
of Job's experiences was the 'loss all in a moment of 
his sons and daughters by the collapse of the house 
in which they were feasting ; and passages in the 
teaching of Jesus seem to be in almost pointed con- 
trast to the experiences that Job found it so hard 
to understand. This is part of Jesus' contribution 
to the solution of the problem of suffering. He 
invites His followers voluntarily to strip themselves 
as Job was stripped against his will, and to the 
bewilderment of his faith. Naked we came forth 
from God, and the wrappings that shut out from us 
life's cold and pain are apt to shut out God from us. 
The things Job prized are good, but we may pay too 
high a price for them. When Job was robbed of 
them he wrestled with God : Jesus calls on us to 
rejoice when we have robbed ourselves of them. 3 
Job's life was spared : Jesus would not have us 
count even our lives dear.4 

1 See Matt. 8'7. a Matt. 2540, 41. 3 Mark io»9*. 4 Matt. io»8 

149 ' 



Jesus and Life 

It is a shallow criticism that tells us the morality 
of Jesus has been superseded because His highest 
ideal for men was that they should love their neigh- 
bours as themselves, whereas there are many now 
in whose minds their neighbours' welfare bulks far 
more largely than their own. Jesus accepted as 
embodying the whole law of God the two Old Testa- 
ment commands : Love God, and Love your 
neighbour as yourself. 1 We have to go to Calvary 
to see the interpretation He put on them. 

Yet to represent the religion of Jesus as the worship 
of sorrow is to subvert Jesus' whole conception of the 
place of sorrow in life. " Sorrow for sorrow's sake " 
is a formula which for Him would have had no 
meaning. In His mind the crucifixion was only one 
side of an experience of which the other side was the 
Resurrection.* Sorrow as such has no place in the 
Christian life, but only sorrow that mellows into 
a deeper and a lasting joy. The true symbol of 
Christianity is not the cross but the cross surmounted 
by a crown. « He shall wipe away every tear from 
their eyes ; and death shall be no more ; neither 
shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any 
more" 3: this is not the dream of a war- weary soul 
that has forgotten the goal set before it. It is a 
vision that breathes the very spirit in which Jesus 
lived His earthly life. 



Luke io*8. * Mark 8J*. 3 Rev. 2H. 

150 



CHAPTER XIV 
Bearing the Cross 

If we were asked to find a formula that covered 
Jesus' conception of the moral life, perhaps most of 
us would point to one of that group of sayings of 
which we may take as typical Matthew xvi. 24 : — 
" If anyone wants to follow Me, let him efface 
himself, and lift his cross. Then let him follow Me." 
The first apostles were called to a literal following. 
For them it involved leaving everything that had up 
till then made their life, going wherever Jesus went, 
listening to His teaching, watching His miracles, 
studying His life, imbibing His spirit. To-day we 
follow Jesus not with our feet but with our hearts. 
To go behind Him to-day does not imply living some 
new kind of life, adopting some new kind of work, 
leaving the old home. It means transforming the 
old life, doing the old work in a new spirit, turning 
the old home into a new home. 

The phrase " Follow Me " must have had both 
these meanings even in the earthly ministry of Jesus. 
A large band of literal followers would soon have 
become unwieldy and would have foiled the very 
purpose for which He chose apostles. His invitation 
was frequently not to join the apostle circle but to 

15* 



Jesus and Life 

live the Christ-like life. We readily grant that the 
cross we are asked tcf shoulder is a spiritual cross ; 
we find it much more difficult to realise that the 
following to which we are invited is a purely spiritual 
following which has nothing in common with an 
external imitation. 

We constantly ask : " What did Jesus do ? " 
and " What did His apostles do ? " with the under- 
lying assumption that if we do what they did it will 
be counted to us for righteousness. Is not this to 
adopt the position against which the ministry of 
Jesus was one long protest ? In particular in all 
ecclesiastical matters, instead of facing the problems 
of our day in the spirit in which the apostles faced 
the very different problems of their day, we ask : 
What did the apostles and Church fathers do and 
what did they say ? We constantly forget that 
quotations without the historical context are as 
misleading as quotations without the literary 
context. 

Brought face to face with the question whether 
the Church of Jesus Christ is the one sphere of human 
activity in which women are for ever to remain 
subordinates, we ask : " What does the Book of 
Genesis say ? " Or, " What was the practice of the 
early Church ? " Nor are we always quite impartial 
in our study of the records. We sometimes 
emphasise the passages in which Paul the Christian 
had not yet finally delivered himself from Saul the 
Pharisee, and forget the great emancipating word in 
Galatians iii. 28. We often discuss such matters 

152 



Bearing the Cross 

as if we had never read what David did. 1 What 
David dfd was to create a new precedent, to sub- 
ordinate the letter of the law to the spirit. 

A literal following of Jesus may not always be even 
possible. Did Jesus never tread regions where we 
have no right to follow Him ? He told men not to 
judge,* yet He judged the Pharisees and He judged 
Herod. May we follow Him there, or do our want 
of insight and our impurity for ever disqualify us 
as judges ? He worked miracles. It would be very 
depressing to think that it is only want of faith that 
hinders us from working miracles, nor does there 
seem any sufficient reason to believe so. He went 
voluntarily to His death when He might have saved 
Himself. Are we never to defend ourselves from 
peril, not even by flight ? Even when we do the 
things that He did, coming from us they are not the 
same. If we follow Him to death, the death that 
we die is not the death that He died. 

Jesus assumes that here as always we interpret His 
words intelligently. But there are two aspects of 
His life of such transcendent importance that on 
these points He will leave us in no uncertainty. 
Whatever else following involves or does not 
involve, it includes saying " No " to ourselves and 
taking up our cross. 

This last phrase has been rightly accepted uni- 
versally as the characteristic motto of the Christian, 
but is it always used in its natural sense ? Whether 
the phrase was even then proverbial for self-sacrifice, 

1 Mark 2*5. * Matt. 7*. 

153 



Jesus and Life 

or whether Jesus coined the phrase in this sense, at 
least His hearers wouldrat once grasp its significance. 
The Jews were only too familiar with crucifixion as 
a form of execution. In addition to the thieves and 
other criminals who were thus put to death, hundreds 
of rebels had been crucified by the Roman Govern- 
ment. It was the cruel custom of the time to make 
the victim carry his cross or part of his cross from the 
prison to the place of execution ; and so we catch 
the idea in Jesus' mind. 

To carry the cross is not the same thing as to be 
crucified. The cross-bearer has been condemned and 
is on the way to execution ; but he may still be full of 
vitality, every faculty sound, every capacity 
unimpaired. Yet though living he has so to speak 
turned his back on life ; his face is towards death. 
He has the same capacity for work and enjoyment 
as other men ; but the things that interest other men, 
the things that a little while ago interested him, 
have lost all their interest. While in the world, he 
is in a very real sense not of the world. He is moving 
towards torture, public shame and death. The cross 
on his shoulder is a perpetual reminder that while 
still alive and hale, he is dead to life's ordinary aims, 
activities, and pleasures. 

There is no other phrase that indicates so well the 
Christian attitude to life. We are not necessarily 
called on to surrender life or health or even happiness, 
to give up our work or the enjoyment of our faculties, 
to leave our homes or sever our family ties ; but we 
are expected to be prepared to do any of these things 

154 



Bearing the Cross 

when the call comes. Our Lord does not ask us to 
live on a* cross : He does command us to live with 
the cross on our shoulder, ready to make the great 
sacrifice when He so wills it. 

The decision to follow Jesus does not necessarily 
strip us of anything that we prize. Rather the joy of 
being alive in a world where the sun shines and birds 
sing and leaves are green, the glow of healthful 
activity, life's simple pleasures, the gladness of 
human love and sympathy, are enriched and purified 
when we receive them as gifts from God through 
His Son Jesus Christ. But they are no longer to us 
the supreme things in life. In the midst of our highest 
and purest pleasures we bear the cross that comes of 
the knowledge that at any time we may hear our Lord 
call us to sell all our prized possessions and go forth 
on some duty of work or suffering. Even in peace- 
time we honour the calling of the soldier. Many a 
soldier goes through the whole of his military career 
without ever once hearing a shot fired in anger ; yet 
from the first day he dons the King's uniform he 
has taken up his cross. The call to surrender his 
life may never come to him, but when it does come 
it will find him ready. 

All through the Gospel story the call of Jesus was 
coming to this one and to that one. It was not 
always the same call. Some were called on to leave 
everything and adopt a new vocation. 1 Others 
were only asked to give up their money or their evil 
life, their popularity or their comfort. There were 

■ Mark i l6 ff. 10". 

155 



Jesus and Life 

many fishermen in Galilee ; many of them no doubt 
were numbered among His disciples : but only to 
Peter and Andrew, James and John, did tne call 
come to leave all and follow Him. There were 
many tax-gatherers in Judaea and in Galilee ; crowds 
of them heard Jesus gladly and repented and 
believed. But only to Levi did the call come to 
forsake the custom-house and join the apostle band. 1 
Zacchaeus the tax-gatherer also became a Christian, 
but he was not asked to leave his work.* He only 
stopped cheating and became just and generous. 
Would Jesus have made the demand He did from 
the wealthy ruler, if He had not wanted him for 
an apostle ? 

The Christian call which, judged superficially, seems 
to stamp Christianity as a religion of sorrow and 
meaningless self-renunciation, is really its tribute to 
the worth of life. Jesus does not depreciate any 
of the good things of life ; His followers are not called 
on to depreciate them. If at any time it becomes 
our duty to renounce home or work or money or 
health or life, it is not because these things are not 
good, but only because at the time they are not the 
best for us. 

Our Lord knew well from His own experience that 
the sacrificial knife He places in our hands would 
often cut deep. Our right hand and our right eye 
are among God's best gifts to us ; He would not have 
us say one slighting word of them. There is only 
one voice at whose bidding we shall surrender them, 
* Matt. 99. » Luke I9 lff . 

156 



Bearing the Cross 

only one claim that we recognise as superior to the 
claim of cherishing them. 

This explains also the otherwise puzzling fact that 
the things we prize most in life, some of them sources 
of our purest pleasures and fountains of our spiritual 
life, are constantly held before us in the Gospels not 
as blessings but as temptations. Their capacity to 
call forth our love is the measure of their power to 
hurt ; and the nobler the element in our nature to 
which they appeal, the subtler the temptation. 
When the pearl merchant has found his queen of 
pearls, the other pearls that have rewarded his search 
are still pearls and no less precious than before. 1 
Only if one of them has so cast its spell over him 
that he is blind to the sparkling glories of the queen 
pearl, does God's good gift become a stumbling-block. 



i Matt. 1345*. 



157 



CHAPTER XV 
An Emergency Code ? 

If one set of Jesus' characteristic maxims reminded 
His disciples that He whom they followed " went 
forth, carrying His cross," another emphasised the 
complementary truth that they were followers of a 
King about to enter on' His dominion. .Much of 
Jesus' teaching centres round the idea of the Kingdom 
of God, and many would make the conception the 
key to all He did and said. 

When we ask what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of 
God we are surprised to find that He nowhere defines 
the phrase. We turn to the group of parables 
collected by Matthew in his thirteenth and by Mark 
in his fourth chapter ; we find much light cast on 
various questions connected with the Kingdom, but 
no answer to the question, What is the Kingdom ? 

For this silence the reasons are not far to seek. 
Even if the phrase had been quite new, the picture 
it would suggest of a body of people who loyally 
acknowledged and served God as their King, and 
among whom God's will in all things prevailed, would 
be sufficiently near the truth. But the conception of 
a kingdom of God was one with which the Jews had 
long been familiar. In early times they believed that 

158 



An Emergency Code ? 

God was both their ruler and their law-giver, and 
even under the monarchy the King was simply the 
vice-gerent of God. But a theocratic state like all 
other states found that there is a powerful element in 
life that aims at thwarting the will of God, and no 
conceivable optimism could imagine that the con- 
dition of the Jewish state even under its best kings 
represented the will of God for man. 

Thus there arose not merely a longing for the 
more effective intervention of God in His world but 
a conviction that some day God would send a King 
who would worthily represent Him ; under whose 
sway God's will would be done on earth ; and all 
sorrow, oppression, and unrighteousness would 
cease. 

But the final reason why the meaning of the 
" Kingdom of God" is not explained anywhere is 
just that it is explained everywhere. To find 
Jesus' conception of the Kingdom we have to study 
all that He did and said, His death and His resurrec- 
tion. He who demands that we follow Him bearing 
our cross claims to be King of the long-delayed 
Kingdom of God, and invites us to enjoy the privi- 
leges and undertake the duties of membership in the 
Kingdom. 

So far there is no difficulty; but later Jewish 
writers had not been content with the comparatively 
simple pictures of the new age that they found in the 
great prophets. They proceeded to elaborate them ; 
and in particular they introduced the conception that 
the new era will not be the final stage of a long pro- 

159^ 



Jesus and Life 

cess of development, but will be ushered in by a 
direct intervention of God with catastrophic sudden- 
ness, an intervention that will take the form of a 
vast upheaval of nature and man's life. There is no 
doubt that Jesus made considerable use of these 
conceptions, especially in the great " eschatological " 
discourse in Mark xiii. 

In our generation attempts have been made to 
show that this conviction — that the Kingdom of 
God, not in germ nor as a process of growth but as a 
completed organisation, was about to burst into the 
life of the world by a miraculous interposition of 
God — dominated the whole of the thought of Jesus. 
The particular interest of this theory for us is the 
assumption with which it is accompanied : that the 
enquiry on which we are engaged, and all similar 
enquiries, are futile. The answer to the question : 
What has Jesus to tell us about life ? will then be : 
He has nothing to tell us about life, about life as we 
know it. 

If the theory is correct, then the directions that 
Jesus gave to His followers for the guidance of their 
lives were of no permanent value. They were simply 
an "emergency code " meant to tide them over the 
short interval that would elapse before the coming 
of the " last things." If the whole world-order is on 
the verge of collapse then life's ordinary activities 
lose their meaning : art, industry, politics, pleasure, 
are but snares that would prevent us from preparing 
ourselves to be ready for the coming of the Kingdom ; 
earthly possessions, even family ties, are entangle- 

160 



An Emergency Code ? 

ments ; health, happiness, life itself, must be sub- 
ordinated-to the supreme duty of keeping our lamps 
bright for the coming of the bridegroom. Thus is 
the ascetic element in the Gospels explained. 

The first criticism of this theory that strikes one 
is that, if it is a true interpretation of Jesus' attitude 
to life, it is beyond all measure surprising that we 
should have had to wait till now for the discovery. 
Granted that now for the first time we know the 
literary antecedents of some of the imagery that Jesus 
used ; granted also that each new generation finds 
something in Jesus that was concealed from its 
predecessors : yet in a book which for nearly two 
thousand years has been studied with scholarly and 
loving care we do not expect to make revolutionary 
discoveries. If the Kingdom as Jesus pictured it 
was not primarily a spiritual organisation governed 
by spiritual laws, then we know nothing of it. 

Moreover, if Jesus' insistent and almost harsh 
demands for self-sacrifice had in view simply the 
imminent doom of the era, it is surprising that this 
has left so little trace in His utterances. When Paul 
writing to the Corinthians discusses the question of 
celibacy, he gives the advice he thinks good in 
view of " the present distress," 1 that is, in view of the 
return of Christ which he believed to be imminent. 
But when Jesus discusses the marriage question, there 
is no hint that His words are not intended to be of 
permanent value. When He dissuades His disciples 
from piling up stores of costly garments and other 

i i Cor. 726. 

161^ 

u 



Jesus and Life 

treasures in their storehouses, His argument is not 
that earthly treasures-are the notes of a bank which 
is about to default ; but that even if they escape the 
clutches of the housebreaker, they will gradually waste 
away under those combined influences that we call 
" time." 1 The treasure of one who lives this life 
in an eternal spirit must be impervious to the ravages 
of time. If disciples are not to worry about food 
and drink and clothing, the reason is not that they 
are about to enter a realm where the science of 
economics has no meaning, but that their Heavenly 
Father knows all about their material wants.* 

Is it not also too readily assumed by exponents 
of this school that the morality which is to avail for 
a limited period is fundamentally different from the 
morality which would be suitable in normal circum- 
stances ? We shall not enquire what a moral philo- 
sopher would think about this : what does the 
ordinary man think about it ? When a man is told 
by his doctor that his heart is radically unsound, he 
may make his will ; but he will not proceed to stand 
on his head and reverse all the laws by which his 
life has been previously guided. His life may so 
pursue its normal course that even his own friends 
do not know he is under sentence of death ; and 
whether in this his conduct is admirable or otherwise 
depends entirely on the nature of the life he had 
previously lived. 

The Baptist believed that the end was approach- 
ing ; but when different classes asked him for 
* Matt. 6*9. » Matt. 63*. 

j6g 



An Emergency Code ? 

guidance, the conduct he prescribed was obedience 
to the laws of honesty, kindness, and good citizen- 
ship. 1 In Romans xiii. Paul wrote in view ol the 
Crisis, the dawning Day that would bring Salvation ; 
yet the whole context is rich in guidance for us to-day. 

In dealing with the passages about " the end of the 
age " we are beset by an unusual degree of difficulty 
in disentangling the actual words of Jesus from 
what may be accretions. It is beyond question that 
the first Christians expected an early advent of the 
Kingdom, and it may well be that they expected it 
to come by a sudden irruption of God's realm into 
man's. We may safely assume that these expecta- 
tions were based on teachings of Jesus ; but in view 
of the persistent misunderstanding of Jesus' language 
by the disciples, we are not entitled to assume that 
these expectations were correct interpretations of 
Jesus' teaching. 

Jesus' mind was filled with pictures of the " last 
days " that were found in Jewish prophecy or Jewish 
" revelation/' In depicting the crisis which the 
nation and the world were approaching He made 
use of the images. But He claimed the right to 
transform prophecy while adopting it, for example 
the prophecy about the return of Elijah 2 ; and it 
would be contrary to all our reading of the Gospels 
to believe that language about the " last things " 
which was highly figurative as used by the original 
authors became prosaic statement of fact in the mouth 
of Jesu^. 

1 Luke 3"ff. » Matt. iy^S. 

163 • 



Jesus and Life 

Jesus certainly announced that some epoch- 
making world transformation would take place 
within His own generation. He definitely dis- 
claimed knowledge of the date of the beginning of the 
new era ; and in various utterances, for example, 
in the parables of the Unscrupulous Vinedressers, 1 
and the Five Prudent and Five Careless Maidens, 2 
He hinted not obscurely that the consummation 
might be so long delayed that when it came the 
disciples might be found off their guard. 

Even if we could convince ourselves that Tesus 
Himself was mistaken, both as to the date at which 
and the manner in which He would return to reign, 
the fact, while of some speculative importance, 
would affect no moral or religious interest. Jesus 
came to found the Kingdom, not to be the nistorian 
of the Kingdom, whether of its past or its future. 
We can see from the New Testament that the early 
Church was guided to this view by God's Spirit ; 
and that, while puzzled by the continued postpone- 
ment of their hopes and compelled in some measure 
to reconsider their attitude to life, they instinctively 
felt that the Gospel in its essence was a Gospel for 
life, in which limitations of time were as much an 
impertinence as limitations of race or territory. 



i Matt. 2i33ff. 2 Matt. 25^. 

164 



CHAPTER XVI 
The Strong Man Despoiled 

If it is misleading to turn into prose Jesus' pictorial 
representation of the " last things " and the advent 
of the Kingdom, it is impoverishing our religious lives 
to ignore it. Our Lord's teaching on the Advent 
of the Son of Man enshrined one of His deepest and 
most fundamental convictions ; and nothing will so 
hasten the Advent as the adoption by the Church 
of that spirit of eager expectation and alert pre- 
paration on which He dwelt so much in the last days 
of His ministry. 

Jesus came that the will of God might prevail 
in the world, that it might prevail through Him, 
and that human institutions might be transformed 
in harmony with the new spirit. What hostile 
influences have first to be overcome ? There is al- 
most no indication that Jesus regarded His ministry 
as a direct campaign against the supremacy of 
Rome. Jesus did not think of Caesar's kingdom as a 
rival to His own ; they belonged to different spheres. 
Only in the spiritual realm could serious opposition be 
feared to the spiritual kingdom that Jesus had come 
to establish. 

Before God's Kingdom can come, Satan's kingdom 
must be destroyed ; and so before entering on His 

165 



Jesus and Life 

ministry Jesus has a iierce contest with Satan, * in 
which Jesus successfully resists the suggestion that 
He should use His spiritual power for worldly 
purposes. The temptation continued in some 
measure throughout His ministry ; and one form of 
the struggle was the warfare against demons, the 
emissaries of Satan that caused mental derangement 
and certain forms of bodily disease. Jesus put 
the work of exorcising demons in the very forefront 
of His ministry ; and the recognition that He con- 
ceived of this as part of the contest with Satan 
explains a fact which otherwise puzzles us : the 
indignation and sense of horror with which Jesus 
repels the charge of being in league with BeelzebuR 
We whose world is not peopled with multitudinous 
spiritual agencies may think the suggestion un- 
worthy of serious notice. But the theological 
professors of the time gave this as the official ex- 
planation of Jesus' power to expel a demon of blind- 
ness and dumbness. Thereby they struck at the 
very heart of the work of Jesus. He conceived of 
Himself as engaged in the work of gradually binding 
the strong man, Satan, before spoiling him of his 
goods, that is ; of his dominion in the world. The 
suggestion that Jesus, while professing to dethrone 
Satan, was secretly on the side of Satan, if generally 
accepted, would have undermined the very founda- 
tions of Jesus' power. It was to turn the proof of 
Satan's overthrow into evidence of his continued 
reign ; and this is the unpardonable sin against the 

* Matt. 4 1 ". * Matt- i2»4 ff . 

166 



The Strong Man Despoiled 

spirit of God which was working in and through Jesus. 
It is as if a* Christian minister were accused of making 
a fortune from his profession and of living a private 
life that gave the lie to all his teaching. 

As Jesus went on with His work, one of its features 
became more and more prominent, the limitations 
under which He labour.ed, limitations for example of 
space and time. When He was in this village, He 
could not be in that village. When He was healing 
a sick person here He could not be healing a sick 
person there. While He was preaching in a syna- 
gogue, other synagogues had to wait their turn. 
He coula only go on day after day, with much fatigue 
and conscious loss of strength, from patient to patient, 
from village to village, from synagogue to synagogue. 
He needs frequent intervals for rest, a.nd sleep and 
food. Yet the work presses and time is rapidly 
passing. 

Only in one way can He multiply His power, 
by training a band of men to deliver the message. 
When the twelve are ready He sends them out on 
a missionary tour, giving them " authority to cast 
out demons "* as an essential part of their equip- 
ment. When they, or at least, when the seventy, 
return with the announcement that they too can 
exorcise demons in the name of Jesus, He regards 
the event as epoch-making.* Satan has fallen from 
his throne like a lightning flash. Since the power 
of Jesus can work through His followers, there is 
a guarantee that Satan's overthrow is permanent, 

1 Mark 3 T 5. * Luke 10 18 . 

167 



Jesus and Life 

not confined to the temporary sojourn of Jesus on 
the earth. 

But the attempt of the disciples to heal the epi- 
leptic boy 1 showed that, even with the new equipment 
of the disciples, where Jesus was not present in person 
Satan's kingdom might still prevail. In one other 
respect also, while the forces of God's Kingdom were 
already present and at work, and Satan's power was 
in a measure already overthrown, it was only in a 
weak and tentative form that the Kingdom could 
be said to be actually present. If the Kingdom was 
to come " with power," Satan must be dislodged 
from his last stronghold, which was not" in men's 
bodies, nor altogether in their minds, but in their 
wills. Multitudes of men, and especially the men 
whom God had appointed as trustees of His own 
people, were yielding voluntary allegiance to the 
dark powers. 

There was only one way in which this mass of 
human purpose which had made evil its good could 
be overcome : by allowing it to do its worst, to work 
itself out to its logical conclusion, to dash itself to 
pieces against the King of God's Kingdom. The 
apparent triumph of Satan would be his final over- 
throw. The victory that Jesus would win over 
evil by allowing it to crush Him would release Him 
from the limitations under which He had worked ; 
and He would stand forth at last as God's King in 
power. Lord of space and time He would be able 
to meet with all men everywhere who at any time 
1 Mark 9^. 

168 



The Strong Man Despoiled 

sought Him, and to strengthen them with the whole 
power of God, Satan at last under His feet. 

Has not much of the difficulty that men have 
felt about Jesus' descriptions of the " last things " 
been due to their refusal to see His death in the light 
in which He saw it? To Jesus His death was not an 
accident nor an incident nor a death in any degree 
resembling any other death. It was the deliberate 
murder of God's heir by the men whom God had 
appointed to be stewards of the vineyard that He 
Himself had cherished with such loving care. 1 It 
was the final overthrow of Satan ; the essential prelude 
to the coming of the Kingdom in power. It would 
mean the final rejection of God's chosen people; 
the loss of their capital city of which a Psalmist had 
sung: 

M If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
May this hand of mine wither ;"* 

the destruction of their temple which the pious 
Israelite loved with a passionate love : 

" Better a single day in Thy courts, 
Than a thousand in mine own chambers." 3 

He in whose heart the fire of Jewish patriotism 
burned with a pure spiritual flame foresaw all this. 
The crisis which Jesus saw approaching was the 
Armageddon of the spiritual world from which God 
in the person of His anointed King would emerge 
victorious, His supremacy at last unchallenged ; 

1 Matt. 2i33ff * p s# I37 5 3 p s g 4 i 0> 

169^ 



Jesus and Life 

but the final struggle, spiritual though it was, would 
shake to their foundations the realm of nature and 
the life of man. Can we wonder that as Jesus used the 
imperfect instrument of the language of Hebrew 
prophecy and " revelation ' to convey to His 
disciples something of His own overmastering sense 
of the impending world tragedy that sent such emotion 
surging through His own soul, they carried away 
but a vague conception of what it all meant ? 

There is no part of the Gospel story where we are 
more apt to get out of touch with reality than in 
Jesus' pictures of the final conquest of Satan, the 
end of the age, and the coming of the Kingdom in 
power. While we must never underestimate Jesus' 
fondness for a pictorial medium for the expression 
of abstract truth, it seems practically certain that 
He thought of Satan and demons as external personal 
existences, tempting men to sin and causing many 
bodily and mental diseases. The advance of modern 
science has led us to seek the origin of disease in more 
tangible enemies than demons ; and the progress 
of philosophy has disposed us to find the seat of 
temptation in our own souls rather than in any 
external power. 

Yet we keep most in touch, not only with the 
atmosphere of the Gospels but with the facts of 
life, when we realise the extent to which the physical 
and mental evils of life are traceable to spiritual 
causes ; to ignorance, and gluttony, and greed, 
and lust, and ambition. Whether we look at the 
city slum, the hospital, the lunatic asylum, the gaol, 

170 



The Strong Man Despoiled 

or the hidden plague, a little experience soon con- 
vinces us that the missionary who will bring in the 
Kingdom is not the physician, the policeman or the 
magistrate, but the exorcist of evil spirits. 

If we would see life as Jesus saw it, we must give 
its full place to His conception that His death and 
resurrection were the crisis of the history of the world, 
and would precipitate the sudden irruption of God's 
Kingdom into the course of this world ; or rather, 
not of this world only but of the universe. For if we 
ask whether the Kingdom, as Jesus pictured it, 
is simply this world of ours and our human life, per- 
fected and glorified, or whether the Kingdom can be 
realised only in a spiritual world beyond time and 
sense, the answer is that Jesus did not draw the 
sharp distinction that we draw between life on this 
side of the grave and life on the other side. This 
life also is God's life ; this world can be transfigured 
into God's world. Yet the Kingdom is a spiritual 
banquet at which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, will 
take their places among the reclining guests. 1 

The issue of the world's moral conflict is no longer 
in doubt. A dynamic has entered the world which 
will bear down all opposition until God has become 
11 the whole life of all His creatures."* Throughout 
the world war we have been told again and again 
that " civilisation is in danger." No one who looks 
out on life with the eyes of Jesus, no one to whom 
the death and resurrection of Jesus mean what they 
meant to Him, can believe this for a moment. The 

1 Matt. 8". * i Cor. 15*8. 



Jesus and Life 

Acts of the Apostles, with its story of fearlessness, 
irrepressible zeal, illumination and spiritual effective- 
ness, is the first chapter in the history of the new 
era. In a few weeks the timid half-blind followers, 
who saw in Calvary nothing but the ruin of all their 
hopes, became the dauntless heroes whose one aim 
in life was to preach Jesus Christ crucified and risen. 
It has been customary to ascribe the transformation 
to the Resurrection ; but this is not the testimony 
of the Acts. The power that made them drunk as 
with new wine was the Second Coming of the 
Master, freed from the limitations of His earthly life, 
on the day of Pentecost. The Kingdom of God had 
come with power. 

It has sometimes been said that Jesus died as the 
Representative Man. Would it not be as near the 
truth to say that the men who crucified Him were 
the representative men : that all those who played 
any part, whether of malice or treachery, of weakness 
or cowardice, in bringing Jesus to His death, were 
just men like ourselves ; that on Calvary we see for 
the first time the true inwardness of the thoughts 
and feelings we harbour every day ? 1 We have 
crucified Gods Son ; and He is risen : henceforth 
there is no more that we can do to Him. The prince 
of this world has been judged ; a new era has begun. 

Was Jesus right in thinking that the Kingdom would 
come in the " twinkling of an eye" ? At least the 
dynamic of the Kingdom did come in the twinkling 
of an eye. But just as God's power was in the worlH. 

1 i Cor. 1 5*8. 

172 



The Strong Man Despoiled 

though thwarted at every turn, in the former era, 
when in a s^nse Satan's will might be said to prevail, 
so Satan's power is present, though it has received 
its death-blow, in the era of God's Kingdom. Satan's 
last stronghold is the will of man ; but all round us 
the stream of God's loving-kindness is beating with 
its floods of healing, life-giving energy at the barriers 
of our own erection, barriers of faithlessness, and 
prayerlessness, and preference for the life which is 
death. God's grace is always beyond the measure 
of our capacity to receive, even if we would open our 
hearts. 

The New Testament from beginning to end is a 
missionary book. It deals with times of crisis when 
the struggle between God's Kingdom and Satan's 
kingdom assumes its most elementary and most 
easily visualised form. Much of the scenery of the 
" last things " could be paralleled from the experience 
of young Christians and young Churches in the Orient 
to-day ; and while on the whole the progress of the 
Kingdom has been a process of growth, it has been 
growth punctuated by a series of crises from which 
we can say : — " The old has gone. Lo ! the new has 
come." 1 



* 2 Cor. 517. 

*73 



CHAPTER XVII 

New Heavens 

While Jesus made large use of the Old Testament 
conception of the Kingdom of God, the image was 
always His servant, never His master. In certain 
important connections where it did not help His 
thought, He discarded it. In some of the sayings 
collected by Matthew in the " Sermon on the Mount " 
He employs the thought of the Kingdom ; in many 
others it has no place. In the two central parables, 
the Unfilial Son 1 and the Good Samaritan,* the 
imagery is taken from quite other spheres of life. 
And in the deepest thought of Jesus' heart, the 
relation of God to Himself and to men, and the 
relation of men to each other, it is not to the state 
but to the family that He turns for pictures to guide 
our thinking. God is not our King but our Father ; 
men are not fellow-citizens, but brothers. 3 

We have then the conception of a Christian state, 
or if we prefer it a Christian family, the members of 
which are united by the common tie of their allegiance 
to Jesus, and by no other tie ; having at their dis- 
posal for the renovation of their own lives and of 
the world they live in the whole resources of the power 

1 Luke i5 Ilff . * Luke io3°ff. 3 Luke 249, ii*« 

174 



New Heavens 

of God, limited only by their own receptiveness. 
But this state or family is not self-contained : on 
peril of its life it must continually enlarge its borders, 
bringing into captivity ever new members and 
ever new departments of life. 1 This state has no 
statute-book. The law of admission is loyal love to 
Jesus. The law of its life is to bring every question 
to the touch-stone of the mind of Jesus. 

Whatever superficial or even real resemblance 
there may be between the life of the followers of 
Jesus and the life of others, Jesus Himself believed 
that He was revolutionising human conduct. " It 
is not so among you "* is one key-note of Jesus' 
moral teaching. The Christian must rise above the 
level of the pagans who are tossed about with 
questions of eating and drinking, 3 and greet only their 
co-religionists 4; above the level of the tax-gatherers 
whose love like their hatred is a mere question of give 
and take. 5 His morality must have God in view, 
whereas the play-acting of so many of the Pharisees 
in their praying, fasting, and alms-giving, was simply 
trading on the popular respect for piety. 6 The 
Christian not merely transcends the point of view 
of the man of the world : he reverses it. 7 The 
Mosaic code had in view the magistrate's bench : 
the Christian remembers that God looks on the 
heart. 8 The demand of Jesus is always for some- 
thing "over and above " the best that men have 

1 Matt. 1331-33. 2 Matt. 2026. 3 Luke 12^. 

4 Matt. 547. 5 Matt. 546. 6 Matt. 6*-**. 

7 Matt. 51-". 8 Matt. 5*ifiF t 

175 • 



Jesus and Life 

risen to outside of Him.i The Baptist, Prince of 
the prophets of the old era. would have a very humble 
rank in the new. 2 

When Jesus was asked which was the greatest 
commandment in the Law, He quoted two : — 
" Love God ; love your neighbour. "3 Jesus may 
not have been combining for the first time those 
two commandments which came from different parts 
of the Pentateuch. 4 But He widened to the utmost 
bounds of humanity the circle within which the 
claims of neighbourliness held good ; and by linking 
on the second commandment to the first, He gave us 
what else is lacking, the reason why my neighbour 
in this wide sense has claims on me. 

Why should I help a wounded traveller whom I 
meet on the road, without first enquiring what we 
have in common ? For this reason, that my neigh- 
bour, even if he has no other kinship with me, is 
related in exactly the same way as I am to the God 
who loves us both. The brotherhood of man, if it 
is not very explicitly taught by Jesus, is implicit in 
the story of the Good Samaritan, in Jesus' impartial 
dealings with all sorts and conditions of men and 
women in the Fatherly name under which Jesus 
teaches us all to think of God, and especially in the 
combination into one, of the two commandments 
to love God and love our neighbour. It is charac- 
teristic that this guiding principle of the Kingdom 
is not a commandment in the old sense at all ; it 
is a new attitude based on new insight. 

* Matt. $46f, 2 Luke j**. 3 Mark 123°*. 4 Deut. 65, Lev. 19 18 . 

176 



New Heavens 

This then is the Kingdom's law of gravitation : 
God in the centre ; all men attracted to God, attracted 
to each other, by the very law of their being ; finding 
their welfare only as they obey this impulse ; able 
to resist it even as we can oppose ourselves to the 
law of gravity, but only at the cost of pain and fruit- 
less struggling against the course of things. If we 
set self up as the centre* of the universe, we can delay 
God's purpose for the world ; we cannot carry out 
our own, any more than we can thwart the law of 
gravity by springing into the air. 

As we yield ourselves to this law, the power of God 
floods into our hearts and makes us strong. Christian 
love is love energising and effective ; it is the de- 
molisher of barriers. Under Satan's rule there are 
barriers between man and God, between nation 
and nation, class and class, individual and individual. 
It is the work of the followers of Jesus to tear them 
down, to seek out men, help them to know each other, 
bind them in a chain of friendship and loving service. 
Clear-cut is the picture that Jesus draws of the 
citizens of the Kingdom ; loving, blessing, praying 
without thought of self, giving, forgiving, never 
despairing, showing mercy, refusing to criticise 
or condemn, and finding all this worth while. 1 

If love is the great constructive force of life, and 
it is onlj while we are in the path of unselfish service 
that we are doing work that endures, hatred is the great 
disintegrating force. Watch a man who is allowing 
hatred to eat into his heart : how it blinds his judg- 

i Luke 7*7ff 

177 , 

12 



Jesus and Life 

ment, leads him to ascribe to Beelzebul work done in 
the spirit of Jesus, corrodes his finer feelings, vivifies 
his baser instincts, turns his energies into false channels, 
and spreads the corrupting influence of his male- 
volence into the lives of others ; for there is a leaven 
of the Pharisees as well as a leaven of the Gospel. We 
understand the Sermon on the Mount best when we 
take it as a commentary on the life of Jesus, and the 
triumph of the Pharisees on Calvary was their un- 
conscious comment on Jesus' exposition of the nature 
of unholy anger. 

Short of hatred there are other unchristian 
tempers that lead men to defy Jesus' law of spiritual 
attraction. There is ambition, for example, the 
ambition that I should get above the other man, 
with its converse that the other man should be thrust 
below me. This sin is one of the snares of the 
" Christian worker." It is suggestive that Jesus' 
n Not so among you " x was directed in the first place 
against an outbreak of this vice of the worldling in 
the apostle circle. Worldliness is never quite so 
deadly as when it happens to mistake itself for zeal 
to save souls. Evangelism when not directed and 
restrained by the grace of God may easily degenerate 
into proselytising and a mere counting of scalps. 
It is hardly too much to say that, of all enemies 
within our borders, love of power and love of glory 
are the most effective hindrances to the free working 
of the grace of God through His Church ; that worldly 
ambition has produced far more treachery, conscious 
i Matt. 20*6. 
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New Heavens 

and unconscious, among the disciples than love of 
money ; and one reason why we hesitate to accept 
the theory of Judas' conduct put forward in the 
Gospels, in so far as they can be said to put forward 
a theory at all, is simply that it is not in accordance 
with our experience. 

Yet feelings of Pharisaic self-complacency and 
contempt, whether on the part of the Christian or 
the outsider, are no more in place on this aspect 
of the Christian life than on any other. Look for a 
moment at the apostles' contest for the premier- 
ship in the Kingdom. Hardly ever did they show to 
less advantage, and we are grateful that the tendency 
to throw a halo round them was not allowed to 
eliminate the story. Jesus knew that in a few days 
the whole future of His Kingdom would depend on 
these men. If even after this scene He did not 
despair of them and they did not despair of them- 
selves, then we who recognise our kinship to the 
apostles better in this scene than in most others 
may take courage. 

Ambition at once produced its natural fruit, dis- 
union : the two separated from the ten. " The 
ten " then formed a union, a union which reminds 
us that unity is not necessarily nobler than schism ; 
for the tie that bound them was ambition, jealousy 
and anger. Jesus' method of dealing with the 
twelve, who at that moment were not in the least 
the twelve of sacred art, is a model for ecclesiastical 
disciplinarians. He distinguished between disloyalty 
and a steadfast loyalty that sometimes mistook the 

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Jesus and Life 

way. It was not a case for the Master's stern rebuke 
but for the Teacher's patient instruction. Jesus 
Himself had known the temptation to see at His 
feet the kingdoms of the world in all their splendour. 1 

As so often happens with our ambitions, the two 
did not know what they were asking. Could they 
have looked forward and seen the two thieves, one on 
His right hand, the other on His left, would they 
still have prayed that they might have the posts, 
one on His right hand, the other on His left ? Yes, 
perhaps they would ; and Jesus knew that. Even 
as it was, who shall say that their petition for all 
its worldliness was all worldly ? Jesus read their 
hearts, and saw that when He explained to them 
that in the Kingdom the only greatness is the great- 
ness of service, they would still want to be great, 
but now in His way. Not long after James did 
tread the bloody path of the Master, 2 and if John 
did not tread it also, a point on which there is some 
obscurity, it was not from any want of will. Jesus, 
who saw the deadliness of sin as we never see it, 
never despaired of it as we despair of it. If only men's 
faces are in the right direction, He is " always eager 
to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient." 8 

Jesus' conception of the world as a vast league of 
kindness in which we fling down every barrier that 
separates man from man, and destroy every influence 
that ' places men in hostility to each other, gave 
the key to the past history of the world as well as 
to its future. Just as the law of gravity had operated 

1 Matt. 4 8f . * Acts 12*. 3 i Cor. 137. Dr. Moffatt's translation. 

180 



New Heavens 

for millennia before Newton discovered it, as the 
orbits of the planets had followed Kepler's laws 
in the long ages before Kepler, so it was as true under 
Satan's reign as under God's reign, that every struc- 
ture based on envy, greed, ambition, malice, hatred, 
is evanescent ; that only work animated by the 
principles of Jesus is founded on a rock. 

Even in primitive times men knew that friendly co- 
operation is the law of the family and the tribe : for one 
section of a house or a kingdom to take part against 
another is suicidal. But men acted in view of gravi- 
tation before they knew the law of gravity ; and they 
recognised its working on the earth before they thought 
of looking for it in the planets and the stars. The 
story of the Good Samaritan, bringing as it does 
even the lowly beast of burden within the circle of 
love and service, 1 is the final expression of the law 
of spiritual gravitation. We know nothing of the 
wounded traveller beyond the fact that he was a 
wounded traveller ; we do not know whether he was 
Jew, Gentile or Samaritan, whether he was educated 
or ignorant ; rich or poor ; bad or good. The priest 
and the Levite conceived of their duty towards him 
as negative ; they let him alone. Even this is an 
advance on the stage which says : Here is an enemy ; 
let us kill him. But all Good Samaritans, whatever 
influences may try to thwart them, have the whole 
trend of things on their side. 

There is one case in which even the antichristian 
principle can be made to subserve the law of love : 

1 Luke io34. 
181 • 



Jesus and Life 

where the Christian himself is the object of the hatred 
or the malice. The Christian attitude towards malice 
occupies a prominent place in the teaching of Jesus ; 
and in the first place great attention is given to the 
duty of forgiveness. Injury done by man to man 
sets up a double barrier ; consciousness of wrong 
inflicted on the one side, of wrong suffered on the 
other ; but barriers are things to be pulled down. 
When the man who has done the wrong pulls down 
the barrier on his side by acknowledging the wrong 
and seeking reconciliation, Jesus tolerates no further 
barrier of resentment on the side of the wronged. 
He dwelt on this again and again. Forgiveness of 
injuries is a condition of prevailing prayer. If we 
do not forgive men, we cannot expect God to forgive 
us. 

The picture is not of God standing on His dignity, 
as it were, and saying : " If you do not forgive men 
their trespasses against you, I will not forgive your 
trespasses against Me/' 1 God's forgiveness is for 
His repentant children ; but the filial spirit towards 
God involves the brotherly spirit towards all who call 
God Father. When the wandering son comes back 
and says " Father, M the elder brother must learn to 
say ' ' Brother. ' ' To cherish pride and resentment and 
refuse to acknowledge family claims would involve 
that we do not belong to the family and are not fit 
for forgiveness. 

At this point as much as anywhere Jesus finds us 
out. It is easy to forgive the hypothetical injuries 

* Matt. 6*5 

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New Heavens 

of a : enemies ; it is easy to forgive our 

;hbour's enemies ; but when we are smarting 
from the concrete insult of a tangible enemy of our 
own it is then \rch the Scriptures tc :he 

teaching of fesos on for^ :ir. r ssibly ap 

to a case like this. Our forefathers rried about 
the unpardonable sin against :he Holy Ghost: are 
we not inclined r y more about unpardonable 5 

against ou: Love of revenge is rften so inter- 

line hatred of unfair dealing 
and a sense of moral superiori:y that it may seem 
almost a virtue. 

The injur bs that make the problem practical for 
os axe of degree of seriousness. Of some 

it would be sacrilege to sp ik. 

" Happy be he who shall seize and dash 
Thy children against the rocks." * 

God will not judge such sentiments apart from the 

is :hat occasioned them. A slave under a brutal 

rerseer, a dependant under a woman with a genius 

for petty insult, the helpless victim of industrious 

slander, when these people in their torture ask what 

forgiveness means for them, the question assumes 

another complexion than it has when asked from a 

Professor s chair. But it is not so paradoxical as 

sounds to say that resentment is often keenest 

and forgiveness found most difficult where the 

:ngs are of that petty nature that only vanity 

would feel, and where as often as not the supp 

gress :: is :onvinced that he is the victim. The 

* Ps. 1379. 

i*3 



Jesus and Life 

apparent magnitude of the sin to be forgiven depends 
as much on our own seli-love as on any quality 
inherent in itself. 

One of the marks of the pagan is that he enjoys 
a state of hostility : the Christian always wants to 
forgive and to be forgiven. Jesus' teaching is that 
God's endless forgiveness of men in Heaven is to have 
its counterpart in men's endless forgiveness of each 
other on earth. 1 In this particular form of well- 
doing, however often we may be called on to practise 
it, there is no room for weariness. There is only one 
limit to the duty of forgiveness. The father does 
not welcome home the wandering son until the son 
says, " Father, I have sinned." We do not 
necessarily promote the spirit of brotherliness by 
ignoring unbrotherliness.* If some one has done us 
a serious injury and we know he is only waiting his 
opportunity to repeat it, when we say we forgive him, 
our meaning is not obvious. 

Yet, whether he repents or not, we have a duty 
towards him ; a duty of a positive kind. The father 
saw the returning son when he was still a long distance 
away, which he would not have done had he not been 
eagerly on the look-out. The Christian's object is 
always to win the brother. 3 Christian tact will 
dictate the course most suitable for each occasion, and 
there may be cases where prayer is our only available 
weapon. An impartial study of the offender's point 
of view is always involved ; this will often of itself 
blunt the edge of our natural resentment. In par- 

i Matt. i8"ff. 2 Luke 17I. I Matt. i8'5. 

184 



New Heavens 

ticular we have often to make allowance for his 
training and his unconsciousness of the full meaning 
of what he is doing. 1 

If those who wrong us minimise the offence, the 
light of the Light of the world will prevent us from 
magnifying it ; will help us to see our grievances 
and all the affairs of our lives as they are, the little 
things in all their littleness, the big things in all 
their bigness. If the offender does develop a new 
mind and says, " I have sinned," the joy of the 
follower of Jesus is not the joy of self-love vindicated, 
but joy over another soul yielding allegiance to the 
world's great law of love. 

Here also Jesus' verbal teaching is a commentary 
on His own life. All through the scenes of the be- 
trayal, the arrest, the trial, the scourging, the mock- 
ing, the crucifixion, there is no bitterness, malice, 
contempt, or hatred ; everywhere strength and 
dignity, and forgiveness where we look for it least 
of all. 1 This patience under wrong was neither 
effeminacy nor stoicism nor fatalism. It was 
trustful submission to the Father's will. But the 
" meek and gentle " Jesus was sometimes neither 
meek nor gentle. He called Herod " that fox "* ; 
but for the most part it is when dealing with the 
Pharisees that He shows us what Godlike anger can 
be. Jesus was infinitely pitiful to all the weak, 
the ignorant, the suffering. Here were men who 
boasted of their strength and prostituted it to base 
purposes, who fought against Him in His work 

1 Luke 2334. * Luke 133a. 

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Jesus and Life 

and tried to thwart God's purpose for the world ; 
and with flashing eye Jesus attacked them in one 
of the sternest denunciations in literature. 1 The 
pity that filled the heart of Jesus for the stumbling, 
over-laden bleeding bullocks, had its counterpart in 
His indignation against the heartless drivers who 
goaded them on. His tenderness for the lost sheep,* 
His wrath against the hireling shepherds who neg- 
lected when they did not harry them, were but two 
sides of the same emotion. 

May we follow Him in His holy anger as well as 
in His forgiving love ? Yes, provided our anger has 
the same springs as His. He spoke not as a private 
individual but as a messenger of God. His denunci- 
ations were directed not against individuals but 
against a system. The wrongs that roused His 
wrath were in no sense personal. The victims were 
either God's messengers,3 or the men and women for 
whom the scribes and Pharisees stood trustees. 4 
He who made the indictment could read men's hearts. 5 
No taint of self distorted His judgment. And this 
especially let us note, when the prophetic mood is 
on us, that Jesus' denunciations ended with a sob. 6 



1 Matt. 23. * Matt. 936. 3 Matt. 2329-36. 

♦ Matt. 2313^. 5 John 225. 6 Matt. 2337*. 

186 



CHAPTER XVIII. 
The Christian Law of Revenge 

Forgiveness will involve restoration of the old 
relations as far as they can be restored ; though the 
man who has done the wrong will recognise that in 
some cases time is required to test the sincerity of 
his repentance before the wrong can be ignored. 
But the ideal that Jesus sets up for His followers 
when they are wronged goes far beyond forgiveness 
in the sense of cancelling the past, or any mere willing- 
ness to shake hands. 

In savage morality each injury is requited by injury 
limited only by the power to inflict it. In the Mosaic 
code revenge is restricted to the extent of the injury : 
an eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth. In one of 
the best-known passages of the Gospels Jesus ex- 
pounds the Christian law of revenge, which seems to 
say that instead of trying to " get even " with the 
man who has hurt us by hurting him in return, 
we should invite him to continue his assaults on us 
with redoubled energy. * 

Round this point, more than round any other, 
is the age-long battle between the Christ and the 
world being fought to-day. When our fathers 

1 Matt. 539-4?. 
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Jesus and Life 

defended the Christian Gospel, their apologetic took 
the form of works on metaphysics or " Christian 
evidences ,J or Biblical criticism. Our problem is 
whether the ethics of the " other cheek " is a Gospel 
fit for a man. It is the offence of the Cross in its 
most recent form. When one is struck, the natural 
man wants to be free to hit back. To become a 
follower of Jesus is to tie our hands behind our 
back, or so it seems. The feeling of shame which 
so often prevents a free confession of Christianity 
is due to the belief, often hardly conscious, that in 
some important matters Christianity and cowardice 
are hardly distinguishable. 

Jesus gives four illustrations of the Christian law 
of revenge. If a man strikes you on the right cheek, 
offer him the other too. If someone claims your 
shirt and is going to file a suit, don't dispute the 
point. Give him your shirt and your coat as well. 
If the state or the military authorities exact forced 
labour from you, give them voluntarily twice as 
much as they demand. Never refuse a request for 
a gift or a loan. 

It is obvious that these instructions are intended 
to be read, as Paul would say, " with the intelligence 
also." To give to everyone who asks, far from 
being a Christian kindness, is often a deadly wrong. 
The slave who, when his master struck him on the 
one cheek, promptly presented the other, would 
richly deserve the castigation that would follow. 
Not only may we do the wrong thing in a right spirit, 
but we may do the right thing in a wrong spirit. 

188 



The Christian Law of Revenge 

When people try to deprive us of onr just rights, 
we may let them have their will through laziness, or 
indifference, or cowardice, or sycophancy, or fear 
of expense, or sheer contempt. Needless to say, 
conduct inspired by any one of these motives has 
no Christian value whatever. 

We understand the bearing of the passage most 
easily if we consider first the spirit against which it 
is aimed. A familiar type is the big little man, 
whose estimate of his own importance extends to 
everything with which he in any way identifies himself. 
He regards as sacrosanct his own money, his own 
property, his own time, his own legal rights, his own 
political privileges, his own person. These men are 
experts on all points of order and questions of pre- 
cedence. Their lives are one long struggle against 
attempts, real or imaginary, to detract from their 
dignity or deprive them of their possessions. 

That is the spirit Jesus wishes to root out of His 
followers. Certainly we have rights, precious 
rights. Some of them have been won only at the 
cost of the blood and the anguish of our forefathers, 
and we shall not lightly surrender them. In the 
well-ordered state justice between man and man 
is a priceless possession, and the Christian citizen is 
as much entitled to justice as his neighbours. It 
would not be good for our neighbours any more 
than for ourselves always to let them work their will 
on us, however cruel or absurd. 

But there is another side to all this. Our Lord 
does not ask us to surrender our right to justice. 

189 



Jesus and Life 

But one of the things that distinguish the Christian 
citizen from other citizens is that if the Christian is 
attacked, in his person, his property, his reputation, 
or his feelings, he tries to understand the point of 
view of the person who makes the attack, and he 
will meet that point of view if he can. Our 
neighbour would not make his encroachments unless 
we had something that he wants 

We ask ourselves therefore : Is it possible that 
unjustly, though perhaps unintentionally or even 
unconsciously, we have been keeping from our 
neighbour something that is his by right ? Jesus 
does not say, " If a man strikes you on- the cheek 
unjustly ," but simply, " If a man strikes you on 
the cheek." We do well to ask ourselves, even 
while we are smarting from the pain, whether the 
blow is deserved or not. In every country and in 
every generation there are whole classes of people 
often professing to be followers of Jesus, who keep 
their neighbours out of their just rights, who simply 
refuse to acknowledge their brothers' claims, until 
their brothers rise and smite them on the face. 

For many it is a very healthy experience to be 
struck on the face ; it stimulates the conscience. 
We are to-day beginning publicly to acknowledge 
that the right to live a full human life is not the 
exclusive possession of a few favourites of fortune, 
but is the inheritance of all God's children. How 
many in our country, how many Christians even, 
acknowledged that right before they were compelled 
to ? It is not a pleasant experience when our brother, 

190 



The Christian Law of Revenge 

whom perhaps we have despised as well as defrauded, 
forcibly calls our attention to his claims. Our first 
impulse is to fight, to refuse to yield a single privilege 
except at the point of the sword. 

Jesus says " No. When your brother smites you 
on the one cheek, turn the other. " " Your brother 
has reminded you in a very ungentle way that you 
have been keeping back from him something that God 
meant him to have. You did not mean, perhaps, 
to be unjust or unkind ; nevertheless you now see 
that you were both. Search your conscience then. 
Perhaps you will discover that you are still keeping 
from him other rights of -which he himself is as 
yet unconscious." Surely it is better of our own 
accord and simply at the prompting of our own con- 
science to give him what is his rather than wait till 
he smites us again on the face. It is not rash to 
prophesy that there is a rude awakening in store for 
all in our country, who cling too long to any kind of 
unjust privilege. 

So much for the case where our brother does 
well to smite us on the cheek. But it will often happen 
that when we examine our brother's claims, however 
dispassionately, they are founded, so far as we can 
see, on nothing more solid than envy, greed, or malice. 
When our brother smites us unjustly, there are two 
possible courses open to us. We can smite him in 
return ; we can fight for our rights ; we can try to 
crush him as he has tried to crush us ; we can add 
our hatred and malice to his hatred and malice. In 
that case, whether he wins or whether we win, we 

191 . 



Jesus and Life 

have doubled the amount of hatred and malice at 
work. 

Let us suppose our effort to resist his encroachment 
on our rights is completely successful ; yet it is a very 
barren triumph that we win. We have succeeded 
in restraining his actions ; but his whole soul is hostile 
to us. His writhing heart is full now not only of 
hatred but of longing for revenge. Jesus has set 
before us a nobler ideal. 

There is only one way in which we can really 
conquer an enemy ; that is, by turning him into a 
friend. To produce two hating heart? where before 
there was only one may be a triumph for the pagan : 
to drive all hatred out of the hating heart, to capture 
the affection of the aggressor, that is the triumph 
of the Christian. But like all other victories worth 
having, it can be had only at a price. For the time 
being at least, our own rights become of secondary 
importance. 

It is no effeminate submission that Jesus enjoins, 
but an ambitious, courageous, large-hearted striving 
that will be content with no revenge short of the 
complete surrender of the enemy, of his will to be 
an enemy. Some loss of property or of dignity 
is a small price to pay for the destruction of one evil 
will in a world where love is the only lasting found- 
ation. The natural man is always asking : When 
may I leave off doing, enduring, forgiving ? Jesus 
wants our goodness to know no bounds. 

Are then the rights, the property, the time, the 
money, of the Christian to be at the mercy of the 

192 



The Christian Law of Revenge 

first comer who takes a fancy to them ? The apostles 
did not understand the matter so. Certain rights 
we are not entitled to give up at all, even when 
demanded by what seems competent authority. 
Under all ordinary circumstances the right to 
preach the Gospel is among these. When the 
Sanhedrin ordered Peter, and John to stop preaching 
they refused point blank. 1 

Moreover we must take the Christian law of 
revenge along with all the rest of the teaching of 
Jesus. This passage does not abrogate the claims 
of justice and honesty and fair-play ; the right of 
women and children, the weak and the oppressed, 
to be protected by the Christian with the aid of every 
weapon at his disposal, physical, legal, or moral. 
A new motive has come into play ; our brother's 
welfare, especially the welfare of his immortal soul. 
But the new motive has not abolished the old motives ; 
nor have our hard won rights ceased to be precious, 
though we see now they are not the all-important 
things we used to think they were. 

In any conflict of motives, each of them, taken by 
itself, Christian, the motive which should finally 
prevail with the Christian will depend upon circum- 
stances. In the end Jesus carried out His own 
precept literally by allowing the Pharisees to work 
their will on Him ; but in this He knew He was 
carrying out God's purpose for the world, and He 
evaded His enemies and carried on a moral resistance 
until His hour had come. 

* Acts 4". 

193 

is 



Jesus and Life 

The New Testament, we remind ourselves once 
more, is a missionary book ; Jesus had always in 
mind the needs of mission work. The men and 
women who first carry the Gospel to a heathen 
country must carry out almost literally the injunction 
to turn the other cheek. This is the new principle 
beside which for the time being all others shrink into 
insignificance. The patient endurance by the early 
Christians of oppression and persecution gave a power- 
ful impetus to the spread of the Gospel. A rebellion 
of Christian slaves, fighting for rights which were 
certainly theirs, might have worked untold havoc 
in the early Church. In the first Christian years 
a reputation for litigiousness would have hurt the 
followers of Jesus more than could have been com- 
pensated by any claims they would have sub- 
stantiated. This is as true to-day as ever it was 
of pioneer missionary work. Had Mary Slessor 
entered the interior of Calabar with a batterv of 
artillery for an escort, she would never have become 
the White Queen of Okoyong. 

But when the strangest of all Christian principles, 
submission to wrong for the brother's sake, has made 
its impression, the rights of the individual must have 
their due ; more elementary and easily grasped, 
yet often almost equally unknown to heathendom. 
Shall the rights, for example, of hundreds or thous- 
ands of Christian men and women be sacrificed to the 
unjust whims of some heathen potentate ? There 
is a stage, often a long stage, where the missionary 
Jxas to teach people to know, and even to struggle for, 

*94 



The Christian Law of Revenge 

the recognition of their status as men and women. 
In all such questions not the word but the spirit of 
Jesus is the touchstone. Submission is never in it- 
self a virtue ; the object of all our yielding is the 
hope of " winning the brother/ 1 

It comes to be then in a measure a question of fact : 
Does our turning of the other cheek win the brother ? 
In any country that we know, is it the case that the 
calm endurance by the " depressed classes " of the 
oppression of their "superiors" has led the latter to 
repentance ? One may grant that a submission 
which is partly ignorance, partly apathy, partly 
helplessness, is not at all the quality that Jesus is 
commending ; that a voluntary yielding to injustice 
by men who have the power to resist will soften any 
heart that is not obdurate. But there are Pharisees 
who can watch the patient endurance of their victim 
on his cross without a twinge of remorse. There are 
men whose minds are so deranged that we protect 
ourselves against them as we would against the 
brutes. Are there men who are morally at the brute 
stage and must be treated in character ? Let ex- 
perience decide, so long as we are " eager to believe 
the best, always hopeful." 

The words about giving and lending present no 
difficulty. The man who gives us an opportunity 
of helping him or helping some worthy cause is not 
an enemy to be evaded but a benefactor. The 
excuses that rise so readily to our lips are the measure 
of our failure to enter into the spirit of Jesus. In- 
ability is the only valid plea and means the depriva- 

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Jesus and Life 

tion of a privilege. The Christian hard is the hand 
outstretched, outstretched in reconciliation, out- 
stretched to lift the fallen neighbour, outstretched 
to give. 

In all this are we taking the heart out of the words 
of Jesus ? On the contrary, when we see Jesus' 
meaning — that the wants, the claims, the welfare 
of others are to be before us all the time, and especially 
in every dispute ; that we are not to have the luxury 
of considering only our own feelings, and that revenge 
is ruled out altogether — then for the first time we 
realise that the task to which our Lord has called 
us, though supremely difficult, is not beyond our 
strength and the grace of God. To the literalist 
it is simply a counsel of perfection to call forth a 
sigh for human frailty. 



196 



CHAPTER XIX 
Shall we Smite with the Sword ? 

One particular case of aggression, an organised 
attack by a community or a state on another com- 
munity or state, has so many distinctive features 
that it is customary to treat it -as a question by itself. 
Is the Christian community, and in particular the 
Christian state, ever justified in repelling force by 
force, or in using force to protect the weak neighbour 
against aggression ? 

The question is often discussed as if the alterna- 
tives were love of peace and love of war ; but it is 
safe to say that millions of those who have fought 
in the world war have hated war with a far more 
deadly hatred, and with far more compelling reason 
than many of those who have done lip service to the 
cause of peace. Pacifism is advocated from as many 
and as diverse points of view as war itself. We are 
concerned here not with those whose opposition to 
war is based on distrust of the influence of capital 
on politics, or of the results of secret diplomacy ; 
not with those who believe that a class owes a greater 
duty of loyalty to the corresponding class in other 
nations than to their own country ; but with those 
who believe that a Christian soldier is a contradiction 

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Jesus and Life 

in terms. There are various shades even of this 
belief ; but no cynicism must blind us to the existence 
of a class of men, small perhaps in numbers, whose 
whole life is a testimony that their pacifism is not 
simply a desire to reap as much as possible of the 
fruits of war while escaping as much as possible of 
its burdens, and who are willing to pay the price of 
their conscientious convictions. 

Once more there is no direct guidance in the 
Gospels ; and this is curious in view of the long 
history of the Jewish wars, and the fact that Jesus 
foresaw the final clash between the Roman Govern- 
ment and the subject Jews. We turn to the passage 
in the story of the arrest in which Jesus rebukes 
Peter i — " Put your sword back in its place. All 
who take a sword shall perish by a sword. Or do 
you suppose I cannot call on My Father and in a 
moment He will station before Me more than twelve 
legions of angels ? How then are the Scriptures 
to be fulfilled that so it must be ? "* 

Jesus here gives three reasons for avoiding forcible 
resistance to arrest. First, a reason of prudence : 
if we adopt the weapons of earthly warfare we shall 
have to abide by them, and in a contest of that kind 
My little band has no chance. Secondly : I have no 
need to use earthly weapons ; I have at My disposal 
the whole power of God ; escape presents no difficulty. 
But thirdly : I have no desire to escape ; My arrest 
is in accordance with the will of God, long since set 
forth in the Scriptures. 

* Matt. 265»ff 

198 



Shall we Smite with the Sword ? 

Whatever the Christian missionary may learn from 
this, it does not shed much light on the duty of a 
nation attacked by another. Except on a doubtful 
interpretation of the first clause Jesus does not 
suggest that the use of arms is in itself sinful. It is 
not the case that nations which take the sword 
always perish by the sword : on the contrary some 
of the greatest triumphs in the history of human 
liberty have been achieved by nations which took 
the sword when, judged by every human test, they 
were hopelessly outmatched. Nor can nations or 
individuals often have that assured knowledge of 
God's will that guided Jesus 'at this crisis. 

In this connection frequent use has also been made 
of the so-called " non-resistance " passage in the 
fifth chapter of Matthew, at which we have already 
looked. But if we are going to be literalists we 
must interpret literally. If Jesus is here forbidding 
resistance by force of arms, He is equally forbidding 
all other kinds of resistance, even verbal protests. 
He goes farther and says we must not only cheerfully 
give what is asked but far more than is asked. When 
Germany demanded a passage through Belgium, 
it was the duty of Belgium not only to let Germany's 
armies march freely through her territories but also 
to furnish supplies. 

But this at once suggests to us that a nation, like 
an individual, is responsible not only for its acts 
but for all the consequences of its acts, so far as these 
can be foreseen. If our acts further injustice or 
cruelty we cannot divest ourselves of responsibility 

199 ' 



Jesus and Life 

by quoting a text of Scripture. The "cursed be 
Canaan '■' school of exegesis has lost prestige. 

The attitude Jesus invites us to adopt towards 
those who wrong us is not necessarily the Christian 
attitude towards those who wrong others. The 
victim is our neighbour as much as the aggressor 
and has at least as much claim to neighbourly treat- 
ment. Moreover, treating the question as a pure 
matter of exegesis, we cannot assume that the words 
of Jesus which are obviously intended for individuals 
are applicable in the same sense to communities and 
nations. The self-surrender to which Jesus calls 
us is never an end, always a means ; the individual 
yields his temporal rights to further the spiritual 
welfare of another individual or of a community. 
This does not involve that the nation should sacri- 
fice itself in the hope, possibly a vain hope, of bringing 
to a better state of mind another nation, it may be 
a small party in another nation. The arithmetic 
of the Kingdom is a vastly different science from 
the arithmetic of the schools ; but even Jesus, who 
gave His life a ransom for many, never suggests the 
expediency of the many sacrificing themselves 
for the one or the few. 

It would not be quite correct to say that pacifism 
always assumes that the destruction of human life 
is the greatest of all evils ; yet some feeling of this 
kind i§ usually at the back of the minds of those who 
believe that all war is essentially unchristian for both 
sides. Jesus' view is that where there are spiritual inter- 
ests at stake, the death of the body is an unimportant 

200 



Shall we Smite with the Sword ? 

incident. Grant that no language will ever describe 
the horrors of war ; grant also that in many of its 
manifestations the law of Jesus is not so much sus- 
pended as reversed : that ploughshares are beat into 
swords and pruning-hooks into spears ; that we cease 
to gather and join the ranks of the scatterers ; that 
we come not to save men's lives but to destroy them ; 
that we rejoice at our neighbour's misfortune, harden 
our hearts against his cries, and grieve at his good. 
And in this pitiful harvest of war, they that go down 
to the battle and they that tarry by the stuff " share 
alike." 

However convinced we ttiay be that we pull down 
but to build up better, that the fire we bring is a 
purifying fire, it is difficult for one who has spent his 
life trying to drink in the spirit of Jesus to throw 
his heart into work like this. Wars will come ; but 
woe unto them through whom they come ! Is not 
all this the price we pay for living in a world where 
Satan's kingdom has not yet been finally overthrown ? 
The path that Jesus set before His followers was 
not a path of roses but of malice and anguish and 
blood. As missionaries of the Gospel they could not 
use the world's weapons in self-defence. And a 
Christian nation too may be too careful of the Ark ; 
may forget that God will defend His own Ark. 

Yet we are co-workers with God even in the defence 
of His Ark. When the issue at stake is the liberty 
which our fathers have won for us through centuries 
of brave and weary strife, the honour of our women, 
the safety of our children, all that our hearts hold 

201 



Jesus and Life 

dearest ; before surrendering them in obedience 
to a text of Scripture, we must be quite sure that 
we understand the text. Many a foul deed has 
been wrought by men who were convinced that they 
were doing God service in obedience to a text of 
Scripture. The Christian may be called on at times 
to cut off his own right hand : Jesus has nowhere 
called on him to cut off the right hand of his wife or 
child or to allow others to cut them off if he can 
help it. 

Even war is not all anti-Christ. War is concen- 
trated history. Men who in peace time thought 
that things just happened, in war-time follow with 
breathless interest the finger of God writing page 
after page of human destiny. Classes and individuals 
learn that none can say to the others, " I have no 
need of you/' The things we used to strive for and the 
things we used to forget are seen in some measure 
as God sees them ; and countless deeds of courage, 
endurance and love stultify the cynic and justify 
Jesus who for ever called on men for splendid forlorn 
hopes, with no thought that His challenge would 
fall on deaf ears. 

A second common assumption of pacifism is that 
love never causes pain ; this in defiance of the facts 
of life, and of the teaching of Scripture, not least of 
Jesus Himself. 1 The attendant circumstances of 
war appeal in such overpowering fashion to the im- 
agination that we are apt to put it in a class by itself. 
Yet it is only an extreme example of the category 

■ Matt. 186,35. 227. 
202 



Shall we Smite with the Sword? 

to which belongs also the preservation of order in the 
home, the school, the state. In the last resort 
the authority of the parent over the child, the teacher 
over the pupil, the state over the citizen, rests on force. 
One may grant that the extent to which physical 
force is used will usually be in inverse ratio to the 
moral force at the disposal of the authority ; yet only 
the theory-ridden will bar out the possibility of 
physical restraint. 

" Blessed are the peace-makers " ; and often the 
most efficient peace-maker is he who prevents, by 
force if necessary, the unruly child, pupil, or citizen, 
from disturbing the peace. Jesus Himself, except 
in the doubtful case of the cleansing of the Temple, 
and the still more doubtful case of the escape at 
Nazareth, did not use physical force ; but are we 
quite certain that the Pharisees found the tongue of 
Jesus a milder weapon than the lash ? J 

In war the slaughter, the pillage, the cruelty, 
the destruction, are naked and unashamed. But in 
many and perhaps in most wars, the sum total of 
the loss of life, happiness, and property is less than 
the loss caused in peace time by greed, lust, apathy, 
ignorance, conscious and unconscious cruelty, in the 
drink traffic and its sister vice, in slumdom, and the 
seamy side of industrialism. Are we to " resist not " 
these enemies also and invite them to extend the 
area of their depredations ? Even the Christian 
pacifist will struggle against them, endeavour to 
secure their suppression by legal enactment, and 

1 Matt. 23 etc. 
203 



Jesus and Life 

expect the State to use all its power, including its 
physical force, to make such legal enactments a 
reality. At least if he does not adopt this attitude, 
it will seldom be on account of his pacifism. 

This reminds us that most of us so seldom use 
force in defence of our rights that we are apt to 
forget the extent to which we use it by our proxy, 
the policeman. But the police force is a modern 
institution ; and it is not so long since each man 
had to defend his life, his family, and his goods by 
the strength of his own right arm, or of other right 
arms which he hired for the purpose. As we look 
back that seems almost a semi-savage state of 
morality. Our real protection from crime to-day is not 
the policeman, but the fact that the vast majority 
of us have tacitly agreed to extend some of the obli- 
gations of neighbourliness to all our fellow-citizens. 
The policeman is not our enemy but our deputy. 

War at the best is but a lawless remedy for lawless- 
ness. In international relations we are still at the 
stage where every nation is its own policeman. We 
have to lift our thoughts a little higher and see a 
neighbour in the man across our borders. Till 
that time comes, does Jesus under all circumstances 
forbid the Christian nation the use of force ? Take a 
test case. Read a page from the story of the 
Armenian massacres. Then, if we can, let us picture 
a battalion of Christian soldiers standing idly by in 
the name of Jesus ! 

Does Jesus then make no difference in war ? On 
the contrary one of the surest tests of the advance 

204 



Shall we Smite with the Sword ? 

of the Kingdom is the extent to which the conscience 
of the peoples revolts against war. Mars does not 
spring full-armed from the head of any statesman. 
It is not after the war-trumpets have sounded but 
in the long years of peace that the Church, if she is 
true to her Master, will wage her war against war. 

Nor will the Church which truly seeks peace in 
the spirit of Jesus be' content to pray for it and preach 
about it. Study and thought and work are needed 
if we are to answer our prayers and fulfil our aspira- 
tions. Since the world has grown smaller, and nations 
affect each other so tremendously for good or evil, 
it has become a Christian duty to know our neigh- 
bours. Suspicion and distrust are fruitful of hostility, 
and it is better to suffer for believing the best than 
for believing the worst. But ignorance is not one of 
the Christian virtues, and if our neighbour is plotting 
to hurt us, we do not help him or ourselves by 
shutting our eyes. 

Whatever the " Resist not evil " passage means, 
it certainly means that we are to study our neighbour's 
point of view, recognise his needs and difficulties, 
and be more than willing to help him to fulfil all his 
just and reasonable aspirations. We have retained 
pagan methods and ideals in our international politics 
long after national politics has been in a measure 
Christianised. When we discover in our country 
institutions or practices that are abhorrent to the 
conscience of the nation, we have an unfailing 
remedy : we bring them into the light. 

Though the Church of Christ is weak in places 

205 



Jesus and Life 

where we had thought she was strong, yet even now 
the search-light of the Christian conscience oi Europe, 
if allowed to play on the council chambers of its 
Chancellories, would hasten the day when we should 
guard the rights and the property of the nations 
as we guard the rights and the property of the citizens 
of our own nation : by a small police force appointed 
by mutual consent and the mutual goodwill of the 
peoples. If the Church were in earnest about this, 
in a few years the day of mighty standing armies 
and navies would be as dim a memory as the day 
of the highway robber. 

In our own country there are demons to be cast 
out that can be cast out only by prayer and self- 
discipline : provocative demons of greed, national 
conceit, boasting and self-righteousness. A nation 
which is typified by John Bull in art, and " Rule, 
Britannia " in music, is a nation in which the work 
of the Church is not yet done. The war found Britain 
with one national anthem that we might sing in 
Church, and that not a prayer for the nation but a 
prayer for the king, of which the best that can be 
said is that the poetry and the music are not un- 
worthy of the early Jewish sentiment. Have we 
realised the extent to which our lives are moulded 
by the songs we sing ? 

Even in war a Christian nation may never forget 
that it is a Christian nation. Here is an extract from 
a circular issued by the Hungarian Minister of 
Public Instruction to all the teachers of the country 
in 19 15. He calls on them to " pay special attention 

306 



Shall we Smite with the Sword ? 

to educating the children in the coming term to the 
respect and honour due to our enemies ; that no 
hatred or contempt should enter the mind of the 
children against the brave men with whom their 
fathers are in deadly combat; and that hate or 
contempt is not to be cultivated in the youthful minds. 
On the contrary they are to see in their enemies 
brave and honourable enemies, as do their fathers 
who fight. 5 '* 

Through it all the Church is called to the high task 
of upholding the Christian ideal, that the only worthy 
victory is not the crushing of the enemy but the 
crushing of his enmity, that any legacy left by the 
war of hatred and longing for revenge is the measure 
of our failure. 



1 Quoted in "Goodwill/' 15th October 1915, from " The Morning 
Post," 26th August 19 15. 



207 



CHAPTER XX 
A New Earth 

Every spirit moulds its environment, and the new 
spirit that Jesus gives will revolutionise the world 
and life. In the Gospels there is abundant material 
to show at least the general direction the revolution 
will take. It is characteristic that Jesus conceives 
of Himself as saving not the soul, nor the mind, nor 
the body, but the man. He came to give physical 
and temporal life as well as spiritual and eternal 
life ; and it is a simple matter of fact that the 
general adoption of the principles of Jesus would at 
once raise the standard of health, vital energy, and 
longevity, to a standard such as the world has never 
conceived. 

When Jesus was asked point blank whether the 
Kingdom had already come, He not merely mentioned 
His medical work among the proofs, but put it in the 
very forefront. " Blind men see again, lame men walk 
about, lepers are being cleansed, and deaf men hear/' 1 
Jesus once refused to help a man who thought he 
had been wronged in a question of property.* He 
never took up the position that questions of health 
or disease, pain or freedom from pain, are unimportant. 

1 See Luke 7**. 2 Luke 12M. 

208 



A New Earth 

When patients came to Him He might have explained 
to them that pain and sickness have their spiritual 
uses, that health and strength misused may become 
instruments of cruelty and vice, that a sick-bed 
may be a centre of light and love. He did none of 
these things ; in no recorded case did He refuse 
a request for healing. 

As the spirit of Jesus prevails in a community, 
more and more will the prophet's vision be realised 
of the time when " death shall be no more, neither 
shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any 
more." 1 Death and pain and disease must be in 
a mortal world ; but where the spirit of Jesus is, 
they will never usurp the place that was meant for 
life and health and joy. In the early days of the 
struggle between God's Kingdom and Satan's king- 
dom in any country, we measure progress by the 
number of our Good Samaritans and of the hostelries 
at their disposal for their charitable work. As 
the Kingdom triumphs, the test of its progress 
is then the extent to which we no more need our 
Good Samaritans, and can close the doors of our 
hospitals and asylums because their work is done. 

The world war has bitten into our minds the 
truth that Jesus tried to enforce by gentler methods, 
that everyone who deliberately or by indifference 
is responsible for stunting the growth or enfeebling 
the bodies of our youth is committing treason against 
the state. Our eyes have been at last opened to the 
fact that we have been emptying our villages, and 

* Rev. 214. 
209 

14 



Jesus and Life 

permitting an annual slaughter of the innocents in 
the slums of our big cities ; that squalor and daily 
anxiety and bitter poverty will not give us useful 
citizens any more than it will give us good soldiers. 

In the war we would have given untold 
millions to have had fighting for us in living flesh and 
blood the phantom army of those who had died 
before their time even in the previous generation. 
Their lives were no more precious to us in war time 
than in peace time, but God was teaching us by 
His old method of insight rather than maxim. 
While Dives had Lazarus at his door, the thought 
that Lazarus might have any kind of relation to his life 
never occurred to him.* When there was an impass- 
able gulf between them, then Dives discovered that 
Lazarus had feet which would make him a useful 
messenger and hands that might bear cool water 
even to Dives. Had Dives discovered the importance 
of Lazarus in this world he would have had no need 
of him in the next. 

In the great Judgment scene at the end of 
Matthew r xxv., the test of our citizenship is 
not the eloquence of our preaching, the orthodoxy 
of our theology, the magnificence of our contri- 
butions ; but the measure in which we have fought 
against hunger and thirst and nakedness, ill-health 
and homelessness and friendlessness. The Christian 
believes in the resurrection of the body, its resur- 
rection even in this life. Who can add a few inches 
to his stature ? asks Jesus. * And the answer is ; 

* Luke ia^ff. » Matt. 6*7. 

210 



A New Earth 

We can ; or at least we can help God to add the inches, 
if not ta our own stature then to the stature of our 
children, by ceasing to poison them, and to starve 
them of nourishing food and fresh air and light 
and health-giving play, ceasing to bring them up amid 
surroundings where Jesus' talk of birds and flowers 
and hills and lakes is a foreign tongue. 

We have seen that the key to the apparent contra- 
diction that runs through much of Jesus' moral 
teaching is that any particular good for the many 
often involves the sacrifice of that good by the indi- 
vidual ; whence arises the anomaly that in the 
individual Christian life God's good gifts often come 
before us as temptations seeking to turn us from the 
straight road rather than as blessings to be enjoyed. 
Jesus made it a large part of His work on earth 
to fight weakness, disease and death. Yet He 
Himself died a young man ; there is no indication 
that He thought much of His health ; He recognised 
that the apostles needed an occasional rest, but 
there is no word of health in the instructions to 
the twelve or the seventy ; and He taught His 
followers to hold their lives cheap when the alternative 
was disloyalty. 1 

In all spheres of life we find people who preserve 
their health and their equanimity by throwing 
excessive burdens on others. In the teaching of 
Jesus soundness of body is never the best, only a 
second best. A doctor in a plague camp, a nurse 
in a typhus hospital, a district officer fighting a 

* Matt. 1 0*8. 
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Jesus and Life 

cholera epidemic in famine time, a soldier carrying 
a wounded comrade through shell-fire, a missionary 
working in the White Man's grave, all these have 
chosen the better part. Better a maimed body than 
a maimed soul. Jesus tended the body, gave eyes 
to the blind and ears to the deaf ; but when His 
own call came He gave His body to be broken. 



212 



CHAPTER XXI 
The Christian Home 

If the spirit of Jesus will transform our physical 
life, no less will it transform our home life. In 
Christian countries we are sometimes tempted to 
think that the institution of the Christian home 
is part of the constitution of things ; that it has 
always been and will always be, and that we need 
have no fear for it. But the Christian home is a 
product of Christian^ ; like every other institution 
worth having, it has been won, won by age-long 
experience and struggle ; and what has been won can 
be lost. 

The Christian home is in danger from various 
sides to-day. The threat from extreme socialism 
at the present moment may not be great in English- 
speaking countries ; but as state control extends, 
the idea of community of children may win adherents. 
The legalising of polygamy in Christian countries 
is a danger perhaps by no means so remote as it might 
have seemed a few years ago. The home is threatened 
by every measure that facilitates divorce for any but 
the gravest causes ; by every development, legal, 
medical or social, that makes vice safe and easy ; 
by the prevalence of irregular unions and unwilling- 
ness to have families. 

213 



Jesus and Life 

The existence of a class of women with wealth, 
abundant leisure, and' unlimited opportunities for 
social gaiety, does not always make for social health. 
There is no Christian home where the children are 
left to the care of servants or to the tender mercies 
of the streets, whether it is desire for club life or for 
a wider sphere of usefulness that leads the mother 
to neglect her primary responsibilities. Every 
economic condition and every social tendency that 
compels or encourages the mother to add to the 
family income by seeking outside employment is 
an enemy of the home. Almost equally to be de- 
plored is the state of things in which the father 
has no part in the education of the children, whether 
he is prevented by excessive hours of labour, or by 
the conception of his home as an hotel where he 
sleeps and takes some of his meals. 

But the welfare and even the existence of the 
home is sometimes threatened in more subtle ways ; 
by the tendency for example to increase at the ex- 
pense of her married sister the social respect in which 
the unmarried woman is held. If spinsters in the 
past have had a grievance in this respect it is not 
to be remedied by reversing the old relations. 

The claim is often made in the name of unchallenge- 
able justice that where women do the same work 
as men they ought to receive the same rate of wages. 
This claim seems to be based on the theory commonly 
held by the man in the street, that each piece of work 
has a definite value in itself and that the question 
who did the work is irrelevant. To the popular 

214 



The Christian Home 

mind this may seem a truism ; yet every author 
artist or musician, has the best of reasons for knowing 
that the general public does not accept this view as 
far as his department is concerned. 

Unless we are to suppose that the woman worker 
with a family to support is to become the normal 
type, equal wages to men and women for similar 
work would place the married woman in an infin- 
itely worse financial position than the unmarried 
woman of the same social class. This is not the 
place to discuss the very difficult economic question : 
What determines value ? Suffice it to say that even 
if to the individual employer it were a matter of 
indifference whether a particular piece of work 
was done by a man or a woman, a married worker 
or an unmarried, it is obvious that the state cannot 
afford to take this detached attitude. 

The war which has revealed to us the unsuspected 
industrial possibilities of women has also sharply 
reminded us of the limits within which alone women 
can be spared for industrial life without endangering 
the state. When married women take their proper 
place in the body politic they will, if they are wisely 
led, make it clear that the relative economic status 
of men workers and women workers is a question 
of the most intimate concern to them, will compel 
the state to realise, a fact which our present system 
tends to obscure, that marriage for women is not 
only a profession, but the most important and hon- 
ourable of all professions, albeit for the most part 
honorary. 

215 



Jesus and Life 

Jesus' conception of the home is gathered for the 
most part from incidental references. He simply 
assumed that the home in which parents and children 
educate each other is the unit of the Christian com- 
munity. " Allow the children to come to Me/' 1 
and nature herself teaches that they are most easily 
and effectively brought to Jesus by their father 
and mother ; for home is not a glorified boarding- 
house but a school for training citizens for the King- 
dom. It was in a home that the love of the child 
Jesus for father and mother was gradualty merged 
in love for the Heavenly Father. He loved the 
home circle of Martha and Mary and Lazarus. Was 
it not from a home-sick heart the words were wrung ? 
— " The foxes have holes, and the birds of the 
heavens have roosts; but the Son of Man has not 
a spot to lay His head." 3 

Was it only an accident that there were two 
pairs of brothers among the apostles ?3 The great 
parable in Luke xv, is a story of home life ; home 
life disfigured for a time by the selfishness and vice 
of one son and the unbrotherly jealousy of the other ; 
still a picture that derives all its beauty from the 
quenchless love without which there is no home. 
In the Acts of the Apostles the Christians are " the 
brothers ; " and, most significant of all, when Jesus 
wants a name for God that will help us to think of God 
as He "thought of Him, it is to family life that He 
turns. Father is not only the Christian name for 
God but the only Christian name,4 the Father " from 

* Mark 10M. a Luke 958. 3 Mark i»«. *9. 4 Luke II*. 

2l6 



The Christian Home 

whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, ' ' l 
and when* this fact has more fully entered into our 
minds we shall more often hear that name for God 
in public prayer instead of metaphysical periphrases 
or the sonorous invocations of the Old Testament 
searching after God. 

While in the Gospels family life is sometimes regarded 
as a joy and a source of inspiration, more often it 
is regarded as a temptation. The love of father and 
mother, brother and sister, wife and child, is often, 
we might even say usually, set before us as a hin- 
drance to our free acceptance of the Saviour, a 
thing that comes between us and our duty. Jesus 
when we see Him at the beginning of His ministry 
has already left His home,* and the call to the first 
apostles was in one aspect a call to leave home and 
kindred.3 Bitter dissension in the home circle is 
an inevitable accompaniment of loyalty to Jesus. 4 

In the discussion that followed Jesus' conversation 
with the rich young ruler, Peter reminded Jesus that 
the apostles had paid the price the ruler 
would not pay. Jesus in His reply implies that 
the renunciation not only of possessions but of home 
ties will be a common, even a normal experience 
for His disciples. 5 In the ninth chapter of Luke 
we read of three candidates for discipleship ; in all 
three cases the hindrance was love of home. 6 Of 
the men who refused the invitation to the Great 

" Eph. 315. » Mark i9. 3 Mark i»6ff. 

4 Matt. io34ff 5 Mark io*9. 6 Lnke 957^. 

217 



Jesus and Life 

Supper one pled home- ties. " I have married a 
wife and therefore I cannort come." 1 

Even more unexpected is the record in the Gospels 
of the relations of Jesus with His own home circle. 
His attitude to His mother in particular has not only 
puzzled many pious souls but has given occasion 
of scoffing to the enemy. In the Temple scene 
when He was twelve years old a mother's heart finds 
it difficult to understand what on a superficial view 
seems indifference to His mother's feelings.* In 
the Cana story, making all due allowance for the 
explanations of the grammarians, Jesus' reply to 
His mother's suggestion about the wine is", to say the 
least, unexpected.3 

In a less ambiguous instance Jesus seems almost 
to abjure His family relationships. As He was 
teaching in a house packed to the door, a message came 
to Him that His mother, brothers and sisters were 
standing outside calling Him. Stopping in His 
talk : " Who are my mother and brothers ? " He 
asked. Then sweeping the circle of His audience 
with that glance which never faded from the 
memory of those who saw, " See ! " He says. 
" My mother and my brothers. Whoever does God's 
will, he is my brother and sister and mother. "4 
On another occasion, a woman in the crowd, 5 carried 
away by enthusiasm and wonder at His teaching, 
exclaimed:- — "Blessed the womb that bore you 
and the breasts you sucked." Surely, we think, 

1 Luke 14* . * Luke 249. I John 24. 

4 Mark 3 20 35. 5 Luke n*7 f . 

2l8 



The Christian Home 

He will seize this opportunity of saying a kind word 
of His mother. " Nay ; rather," He replied, 
M blessed they who hear God's word and keep it." 
So far as appears from the records it is not till the 
last scene on Calvary 1 that our Lord seems to evince 
that affectionate consideration for His mother that 
we expect from the beginning. 

We have to keep in view the selective principle 
that preserved for us the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. 
It may well be that the first disciples knew and 
cherished scores of touching incidents of the home 
life of Jesus, of His tender affection for His mother, 
His brothers and His sisters. May we not even say 
that the stories just recalled find a place in the 
tradition just because they are not typical? It 
was the surprise of these sayings of Jesus, contra- 
dicting as they did all that was known of His domestic 
relations, that preserved them in the record. 

We note also that Jesus' treatment of His mother, 
which gives so much offence to the modern secularist, 
so far as we have any record was no puzzle to Mary 
herself. We have inherited a theology which tends 
to exalt metaphysics at the expense of emotion ; 
and part of the price we pay is our failure to realise 
what it cost Jesus to speak as He did in public of 
His mother, his brothers and sisters. He who has 
drawn for us the father of the prodigal, his love that 
never failed, would not lightly wound a mother's 
heart. Rather is the very depth of His affection 
the measure of His grief in recognising that those who 

1 John 19 26 *. 
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Jesus and Life 

were nearest Him by ties 01 flesh were no longer 
akin to Him in spirit. The members of His family 
thought He was insane ; they were calling Him out 
of a room crowded with people hanging on His 
words. 1 The hand that beckons us away from 
the work God has given us, however dear it be ; 
is a hostile hand. Jesus was following His own 
teaching that one must pluck out one's right eye 
rather than lose the track. 

If we can only keep our friendships by warping 
our whole natures and living our whole lives on a 
lower plane, then Jesus' teaching is clear. Better a 
world of broken hearts than a soul dethroned. In 
the long run to degrade ourselves to please those we 
love is to wrong them as much as we wrong ourselves. 
But Jesus' call to His disciples to be ready to break 
even family ties would have no meaning unless He 
recognised the home as among God's richest gifts 
to men. Family love is a pearl of great price which 
we have no right to barter but for one thing, the pearl 
of greater price. 

In the home as Jesus conceives it, husband and 
wife educate each other ; but the master educator 
is the child. " He called a child and set it in the 
midst of them."* The helplessness of the child, the 
ease with which he can be fatally hurt, appealed to 
Jesus as it appeals to all natures that combine 
strength and tenderness.3 The child, like the 
Master, is no "respecter of persons," is the " only 
true democrat." The infant who has not as yet the 

« Mark 3* *. * Matt. i8». 3 Mark 94*. 

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The Christian Home 

very conception of self is a rebuke to our heated 
striving for recognition. 1 The innocence of children 
gives them a direct access to God which we can 
reach only by an all but impossible purity of heart.* 
Interference with the free access of children to Him 
is one of the few things that make Him angry. 3 The 
sight of those baby faces,4 after the discussion with 
the Pharisees about divorce, must have been as cold 
waters to a thirsty soul, and would be a sunny 
memory in the next scene when the rich ruler turned 
away ; for the little child is as indifferent to money 
as Jesus Himself. 

The child knows nothing of laws of nature, but 
believes that all things are possible : Jesus shares 
their belief. 5 The utter fearlessness of children, 
their boundless belief in the possibilities of life, make 
them reckless beyond all human beings ; and Jesus 
put recklessness high among the virtues. Like 
Jesus, children have a limitless faith, not only in the 
world but in men ; they have the open receptive 
mind, the trustful heart, that Jesus loved. Jesus 
loved children just because they were children, with 
life all before them. We sing " A day's march 
nearer home/' as if the mere passage of time brought 
us nearer home ; when our experience often is that 
each day as it closes sees us gripping the truth of 
God with a less firm grasp. 

If we are to be fit for the Kingdom, many of us 
have to unravel most of our life's work ; to go right 

1 Luke 94*ff. 2 Matt. 18™ ; 58. 3 Mark iom. 

4 Mark io^ff. 5 Matt. 1720. 

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Jesus and Life 

back to where we started and become as children. * 
Or as it is put even more strongly in John's Gospel, 
we have to go back even beyond the beginning. 
Nothing less radical will suit than a new birth.* We 
are greatly concerned what we are to teach our 
children. To Jesus the question is, What can we 
learn from our children ? In the teaching of Jesus 
as nowhere else, do we find the thought, surely one 
of the most daring thoughts that ever entered the 
mind of man, that if we would know the heart of God 
we must search our own hearts, as they open 
towards our parents on the one side and our children 
on the other. 3 If we do not find God there, we shall 
not find Him anywhere. 

The Christian society can have no higher aim than 
to be a family where the brotherly and sisterly spirit 
prevails4 ; and Jesus who is the head, is nevertheless a 
member of the family, one of " the brothers." 5 Especi- 
ally with the little ones He so identifies Himself that 
to receive the child is to receive the Master Himself. 6 

All this no doubt is idealising ; but it is idealising 
not the imaginary but the real. In Jesus every one 
of the natural relationships of life is transfigured. 
To be a member of a family is to be called with a high 
and holy calling to a position in which we grow and 
learn of God and justify our existence, only as we 
abandon ourselves in seeking the welfare of our little 
community, and are quick to learn what each member 
can teach us. 

1 Mark io*5. * John 3J. 3 Luke n»; I5" ff . 

4 Mark io3°. 5 Matt. 2540 * Mark 937. 

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The Christian Home 

It was characteristic of Jesus' attitude to life to set 
a child in the midst of us, not that we might teach 
him but that he might teach us. He always wants 
us to remember not only " the other man," but the 
other side of things. On the whole in Gospel story. 
we see the scribes and Pharisees at their worst. 
The genuine piety, which kept the order from dis- 
solution and which sometimes peeps through the 
New Testament picture, neither they nor their pupils 
were likely to forget. In contact with Jesus tax- 
gatherers, sinners, women, children, are seen only at 
their best. In many of them there were ugly enough 
things ; but to these the eyes of the world were 
sufficiently wide awake ; Jesus shuts His eyes. 

All Jesus' references to children are reminiscences 
of a happy childhood among His own brothers and 
sisters. Over Jesus' love to His mother the Gospels 
have drawn a veil which will not hide its existence 
from anyone with imagination. But there came a 
stage in His ministry when all earthly ties, even the 
dearest, became by comparison insignificant ; 
w r hen He must take His place as the elder brother in 
the great family of God ; when Mary herself must 
learn, perhaps after a struggle and with a sword 
piercing her soul, to see in Jesus not only the Son of 
Marv, but the Son of Man. 

There is no touch of exaggeration in our Lord's 
frequent warnings of the stumbling-blocks that lie 
in family aSection. Many a business man continues 
to follow courses against which his whole soul revolts, 
because he would rather compromise with honesty 

223 



I - Jesus and Life 

than have the cold wind of poverty or discomfort 
blow on his wife and family. Bright young lives 
have been lost to the mission field because family 
affection has proved a snare instead of the blessing 
God meant it to be. In those times of crisis with 
which above all the New Testament deals, home joys 
which in quieter times lead heavenward may become 
our undoing. In non-Christian lands to-day the 
refusal to follow Jesus is often not a blank negative, 
but takes the old, old forms : " Wait till I have 
buried my old father or my old mother; " " A little 
while longer with my home circle ;" " Shall I have 
any place to lay my head ? "■ 

It is to no lonely life that Jesus calls us. We need 
sympathy and the stimulus of friendship and love. 
Among the most touching things in the Gospels is 
Jesus' craving for companionship in the crises of His 
life, on the Mount of Transfiguration for example, or 
in Gethsemane. The family is God's provision to 
meet this need of our nature ; and if at any time 
loyalty to Jesus involves separating ourselves from 
our natural comrades it is only that we may enter into 
the larger and fuller brotherhood and sisterhood of 
those who love Him. 

Once more Jesus finds us out. How many 
Churches in Christian or non-Christian lands could 
truthfully assure those who are called on to make 
the sacrifice that in the Church they will find a 
home where warm brotherly affection and friendly 
sympathy will all but make them forget what they 
have lost ? It is something at least to be reminded 

224 






The Christian Home 

of the ideal that Jesus had for us, and the promise 
He made in our name. 

In the early days of the world war thousands of 
our best and bravest knew in their own experience 
that Jesus was not painting in too dark colours when 
He represented the love of father and mother, 
brother and sister, wife and child, as being at times 
the most terrible temptation a man has to fight. 
Once more it is Jesus' teaching on bearing the cross. 
The follower of Jesus so prizes this gift of God that 
when His call ccmes he will give up his home that 
others may enjoy theirs ; the men of one generation 
will break up their homes by' the thousand that their 
children and their children's children " shall sit every 
man under his vine and under his fig tree ; and none 
shall make them afraid/' 



225 

15 



CHAPTER XXII 

Caesar's Sphere and God's 

The question has been asked, Was Jesus a patriot ? 
Of patriotism in the pot-house orator's sense of the 
word He had none. But He loved with a passionate 
love the national altar in Jerusalem which in its 
inception stood for all that was best and purest in 
the national life. He loved the village synagogue, 
the village life, the village home. Every blade of 
grass on every hillside and every ripple on the water 
was dear to Him. In the humblest of His country- 
men He saw a trophy to be won for God. He nur- 
tured His soul on the Jewish Scriptures ; to Him 
Moses and David and the prophets had come straight 
from God with their message ; and His country was 
the vineyard of God's special love. 

Jesus' most explicit teaching on the subject of the 
home was given in response to two questions, one 
put by the Pharisees, 1 the other by one of His own 
disciples.* In the circumstances of the time it was 
inevitable that He should be challenged to define 
His attitude to the state. The issue was raised in 
the question of the legality from the Jewish point 
of view of paying the capitation tax to the Roman 
Government. 3 

i Mark 10*. » Mark io»«. 3 Mark I3 X 1 ff . 

326 



Caesar's Sphere and God's 

The deputation which raised the question included 
representatives of two parties which answered it 
differently. The Pharisees who resented the domina- 
tion of Rome were in theory at least bitterly opposed 
to the tax ; and if Jesus approved payment would 
use His answer to end His influence with the common 
people. The supporters of Herod, who was a 
nominee of Rome, presumably approved of the tax ; 
and if Jesus declared against it, both they and the 
Pharisees who hated Jesus more than they hated 
Rome would have ground for bringing a sedition 
charge against Him. Moreover partly by flattery, 
partly by the form of their question, they tried to 
shut Him to an inescapable " Yes " or " No/' 

Jesus answered in one of those baffling, thought- 
compelling utterances, that shed God's light on our 
problems while nevertheless leaving it to ourselves 
to solve them : " Pay Caesar's debts to Caesar ; 
God's to God." 

The answer has sometimes been treated as if it 
were little more than a clever evasion ; but for several 
reasons we cannot rest in that attitude. The 
question was one which was bound to arise, not 
merely then but at every stage of the history of the 
Christian Church. Even to-day we are not within 
sight of a final solution. We cannot imagine that 
Jesus answered such a question with a quip. 

Further, Jesus must have known, what was the 
fact, that His answer did nothing to mitigate the 
hostility of either section of His opponents ; that 
on the contrary He was playing into the hands of 

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Jesus and Life 

both parties by refusing to side with either. On the 
one hand His answer was understood as finally 
closing the door on any hope the " patriotic " party 
may have still placed in Him ; and the Jerusalem 
crowd could now be and actually was induced to 
demand His death. On the other hand there was 
nothing in the non-committal form of His answer 
to prevent His enemies accusing Him of sedition ; 
which, in fact, they did, and that successfully. 

Jesus' answer was evasive ; but what He was 
evading was neither death nor unpopularity. If He 
fell into the trap He might die at the hands of Rome 
as a political suspect. But it was written in the 
counsels of God, that, whatever the nominal charge, 
it must be obvious to the world that He died as the 
Messiah, rejected by the leaders of His own people. 

This great saying of Jesus is constantly expounded 
as being His authoritative declaration on the relation 
between Church and State. But in the first place 
Jesus was not speaking to the Church at all, to 
His own followers ; nor was He even speaking to 
members of a typical state. The point of the ques- 
tion was that the men who put it belonged to that 
abnormal type of state that we call theocratic. 
In the second place Caesar does not stand for the 
typical Government ; he was not merely a foreigner 
but- a heathen. The question was whether a member 
of a religious state that acknowledged God alone as 
King, could without sin formally recognise the suprem- 
acy of a foreign usurper who was religiously unclean. 

There is a striking parallel in the situation in 

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Caesar's Sphere and God's 

India to-day. Not only is the British Government 
a foreign domination ; but in theory at least to the 
Brahmin the Briton is religiously unclean. There 
are the Herodians in the Native States, and the 
Sadducees occupying honourable and well-paid posts 
in British India, on the whole well pleased with things 
as they are. There are the voiceless multitudes, 
not without discrimination or a sense of justice, 
but with the mob's tendency to be swayed by popular 
orators. India has her " patriotic " party too, 
clamouring for Home Rule and a revival of all things 
Indian, not least of Indian religions. 

The resentment of the Home Rule party among 
the Jews against the Romans showed itself in con- 
tempt for the tax-gatherers who collected the 
customs duties imposed by the Romans on articles 
of commerce, and in hostility to the capitation 
tax levied on adult Jews up to the age of sixty- 
five. Indian " patriotic " feeling sometimes takes 
the form of antipathy to Government service, a 
preference for the freer and more irresponsible life of 
the lawyer or the journalist. 

As in other sayings of Jesus, we have first to look 
at the surface interpretation and then go deeper. 
" Pay to Caesar what is due to Caesar/' This can 
certainly be understood, and is most easily under- 
stood, as sanctioning payment of the tax by the 
Jews. The coinage system is peculiarly the symbol 
of the administration, and one of the best tests of its 
excellence. Good government is worth paying for. 

The alternative to Roman rule was government 

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Jesus and Life 

by the Pharisees and the priestly Sadducees, as the 
alternative in India to British rule is government by 
the Brahmins. Jesus no doubt saw that the people 
were at least as happy under the Romans as they 
would be under the Pharisees. There was also some 
contempt in the answer. Their antipathy to Rome 
had its roots, not, as they pretended, in religious 
puritanism, but in offended racial pride. When 
they should have been cultivating their vineyard 
they were occupied with questions of ownership ; 
as many young Indians to-day frankly give the 
supreme place in their lives to political issues over 
which they have little control, to the exclusion of 
urgent social, moral, and religious problems, the 
solution of which is largely in their own hands. 

There was a further point. Was it really logical 
to conclude that because Caesar's image and name 
were on the coin, therefore the coin was Caesar's and 
must be paid to Caesar ? There is a prior question : 
Had Caesar any right to have his name and image on 
Jewish coins ? The Jews had no images on their 
own coins. The very existence of a human head, 
especially a foreign and heathen head, on a coin for 
Jewish use was sacrilege. But this was only one of 
many symbols of Roman domination. To accept 
the domination itself while boggling at one of its 
symbols was simply another exhibition of the 
Pharisaic predilection for straining out a gnat while 
swallowing a camel. Whatever Jesus thought of the 
political situation, the policy of resistance by pin- 
pricks would not appeal to Him. 

230 



Caesar's Sphere and God's 

All this was on the surface ; and that the Pharisees 
took a purely superficial view of the subject was 
evident from the form of their question : Is it 
allowed ? — allowed, that is, by the written law or 
by tradition; is it "the proper thing"? Jesus 
indicates here, as He has already suggested in His 
teaching on marriage, that the solution of life's 
biggest problems is not found in any book, but in the 
heart of man illumined by the Spirit of God 

The history of the Jewish people had been one 
long attempt to combine Church and state. The 
attempt had failed in various ways. The whole 
conception of law in the state is fundamentally 
different from the conception of law in the Church. 
The state is concerned with acts, not with character ; 
with praiseworthy conduct, not with right feeling ; 
with ceremonial, not with religion. The state can 
enforce its laws ; the sphere of the Church is the 
things of the spirit where God alone can effectively 
judge and control. The state deals with many 
matters which are outside the purview of the Church ; 
and the Church dwells much in regions where the 
state has no jurisdiction. 

But the decisive reason why a Church state is 
foredoomed to failure is given in the parable of the 
Unscrupulous Factor. 1 The question in that story 
is whether the factor is a harbour-light to beckon us 
or a beacon to warn us off. There is no need to 
discuss the question whether Jesus with His courage 
and disregard of the proprieties would have held up 

1 Luke i6 xff . 
231 * 



Jesus and Life 

for our imitation a bad man in respect of some virtue 
which he happened to have. He who compared the 
coming of the Son of Man to the stealthy approach 
of a house-breaker 1 might not have shrunk from 
commending the virtues of a scoundrel. The point 
is that He does not seem ever to have done so. 
The judge who was influenced by no consideration, 
human or divine, except his own comfort, * and the 
disobliging man who lent three loaves to a friend 
at midnight only to save himself troubled are not 
compared to but contrasted with God, who is more 
ready to hear His children's cry than they are to cry. 
We are confirmed in this conclusion if we ask what 
lesson is drawn from the parable by men who believe 
Jesus praised the unscrupulous factor. Dr. Bruce,4 
for example, explains the story as meaning that 
our riches, and even riches acquired unjustly, should 
be used in doing kindnesses to the poor ; thus 
winning the favour of God and lightening our lot 
in the future world. In other words we acquire 
wealth by fair means or foul, and then use it to pay 
premiums to insure us against uncomfortable con- 
sequences hereafter. Surely Jesus did not mean 
that. " He that sacrificeth a thing wrongfully 
gotten, his offering is made in mockery, and the 
mockeries of wicked men are not well-pleasing/'S 

* Matt. 2443. * Luke 18*. 3 Luke 118. 

4 Expositor's Greek Testament p. 586. Dr. Bruce however 
stipulates that we must not continue to acquire wealth dishonestly 
and then use it in philanthropy. 

5 Ecclesiasticus 34 18 . Quoted in The Social Teaching of the 
Bible, p. 142. 

232 



Caesar's Sphere and God's 

At the end of the parable Jesus goes on to speak 
about faithfulness and dishonesty in discharge of 
trusts ; and it is only reasonable to suppose that that 
is the subject of the parable. To make temporary 
provision for himself while he is looking for another 
situation, the factor reduces the landlord's claims 
on the tenants, and thus makes things comfortable 
for himself at his master's expense. In sorrowful 
irony Jesus says to His hearers : " Imitate the 
unscrupulous factor ! Take your ill-gotten gains and 
use them to make friends for yourselves ; so that 
when you die they may receive you into the eternal 
tents/' The tricks of the worldling may succeed 
in the sphere of the worldling; the children of the 
light must find their models elsewhere. 

Lowering the Master's claims ! That is what the 
state not only does but must do. The state must 
always act in view of "the hardness" of men's 
hearts. No state in the world to-day would even 
dream of trying to enforce legislation based on Jesus' 
conception of womanhood and of sexual virtue. In 
dealing with liquor problems our own state at least 
is quite out of touch with Christian sentiment ; and 
no state in its treatment of what are called social 
questions can keep pace with the most Christianised 
portion of the community. 

The state must listen to the claims of prudence as 
well as of righteousness ; must keep in mind, not 
only its members who are consciously seeking the 
Kingdom of God, but those whose deliberate aim 
is to prolong and extend the kingdom of Satan, and 

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Jesus and Life 

the very large number whose sympathies and efforts 
are divided between the two. Not " What one 
ought/' but " Of what one ought, what one can/' 
is the motto of the statesman. A whole state will 
often respond to a call from trusted leaders to rise 
above itself, and righteous legislation is in itself an 
effective instrument of education ; yet the state as 
God's factor must pursue a policy of counting the 
cost, is compelled by the stern facts of life to take 
the Master's bills and write eighty or even fifty where 
the Master's claims are a hundred. 

But in the Church there can be no counting of the 
cost : what is right is right though the heavens fall. 
The Church lowers her Master's claims at peril not 
only of her welfare but of her existence. And so 
Jesus founded a new community, bound only by the 
spiritual bond of allegiance to Himself ; a Kingdom 
which was not of this world, 1 which has freed itself 
from the externalities and the demoralising com- 
promises of the state. 

The members of this Kingdom are also members of 
the family, the state,, and other communities. It 
depends entirely on these visible communities how 
far membership in the Kingdom is compatible with 
membership in them. A family may try to turn the 
Messiah from His vocation. A Church state may 
combine with a civil state to crucify the King of the 
spiritual state. In all such cases the relation of the 
citizens of the spiritual kingdom to the visible 
communities is uncompromising opposition. 
* John i8l«. 

234 



Caesar's Sphere and God's 

But the Kingdom of God is like leaven. 1 As the 
Kingdom's* principle of spiritual gravitation becomes 
more and more widely recognised and accepted, 
antipathy between the visible and the invisible 
community diminishes until at last the Christian 
may find his membership of a family, not a tempta- 
tion but a source of strength and inspiration. It 
may even become possible to speak of a Christian 
state ; but such phrases are loose and dangerous. 
Whether the leaven will ever work so effectively as 
to give us in some corner of the earth a state which 
whole-heartedly seeks the will of Jesus, looking 
neither to the right hand nor to the left, we do not 
know. We do know that no such state exists now 
or ever has existed in the past. 

The Government of our most Christian states is 
a compromise with a more or less effectively sup- 
pressed paganism. So long as this is so, to speak of 
a Christian state is hurtful in two ways. It tends to 
obscure from us the real issue in the vexed question 
of the relation of Church and state. That a Christian 
Church should be in some measure controlled by a 
Christian state may seem to be at least a proposition 
worthy of debate. Whether the spiritual interests 
of a Christian Church should be in any degree at the 
mercy of a state which only holds together as it 
compromises with paganism is not a question for 
serious discussion. To make the Christian Church 
a function of the state does not make the state a 
Christian state. 

* Matt. 1333. 
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jesus and Life 

Further there can be no question that the prestige 
of the Church in non-Christian lands suffers seriously 
from the assumption that all the social and moral 
phenomena of Western lands are compatible with 
control by a " Christian state/' 

Jesus* view, then, is that the experiment of the 
Church state in which the things of God are also the 
things of the state has been tried and has failed ; 
the things of God have inevitably suffered. Hence- 
forward, two spheres must be recognised : the 
spiritual Kingdom and the earthly. There is no 
inevitable inconsistency between them, and in the 
ideal state the Christian would be a loyal member of 
both communities. But in the communities of 
actual life, there will often be a clash of feeling, or 
incompatibility of demands for action. The things 
of Caesar must yield to the things of God. 

The work of the Church in the state, then, is to 
seek so to transform the state that in it life as Jesus 
conceives it may be lived. We have to widen our 
conception of Christian work. It is still a living 
issue whether the Church should confine herself to 
purely " spiritual " activities ; whether her only part 
in the work of governing the state is to imbue with 
Christian motives and ideals the men and women in 
whose hands the government lies, or whether she is 
called on to be a discerner of spirits, to label as 
Christian or brand as unchristian aspects of our social 
and political systems and the various proposals for 
their reformation. 

Questions of policemen's uniform and the colour of 

236 



Caesar's Sphere and God's 

our postage stamps may be safely left to the children 
of this world. The Church can worthily deal only 
with questions that are worthy of her. She enters the 
political sphere, not to degrade herself, but to raise 
to the level of great moral and spiritual issues 
questions that concern the life of the people. In his 
ninth chapter Luke tells us that when the crowd 
followed Jesus and His disciples to Bethsaida, Jesus 
began to speak to them about the Kingdom of God ; 
but He did not stop there. He cured those among 
them who needed medical attention and when they 
were all hungry He fed them. 

In its Foreign Mission enterprise the Church has 
been instinctively led to adopt the same principle. 
The only limits we set to the activities of the Church 
in non-Christian countries are the needs of the people 
and our own resources. The claims on the Church 
differ in different countries, in different circum- 
stances, in different ages ; but in all ages the Church 
which is following in the footsteps of the Master will 
be found wherever there are enemies of the Kingdom 
to be rooted out, be they physical, mental, social, or 
political. 

There are multitudes of our people living in houses 
that give the lie to the Christian doctrine of man. 
Every year we offer a holocaust of child life to 
smoke and grime and hunger and ignorance and 
drink and ground rents. Thousands of men are 
battening on the vice, the degradation, the misery of 
their neighbours. A Church which could look on all 
this and find nothing to say but pious platitudes or 

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Jesus and Life 

vague generalities might have a Gospel to preach : 
it would not be the Gospel of Jesus. 

We sometimes complain that the world will not 
listen to our message ; but the world has a sharp ear 
for false notes. The " sinners " of our day may not 
always have a high standard for themselves ; they 
always have a very high standard for those who 
claim to speak in the name of Jesus. If men cannot 
square the creed we live with the Jesus of Gospel 
story, they turn away. A Church whose Gospel is 
primarily a Gospel for the poor, which finds its 
vocation not among the healthy but among the sick, 
which can make the lame walk and the blind see, a 
Church which spends itself in driving out evil spirits, 
which speaks with the conviction of Jesus and the 
apostles and is willing like them to pay the price of 
conviction, is a Church to which men will listen. 

Wherever men or women are casting out devils in 
the name of Jesus, there are our brothers and our 
sisters. The school teacher, the sanitary inspector, 
the trade union secretary, the novelist, the employer, 
the landholder, the clergyman, the Cabinet minister, 
there is but one question the Church can ask of each : 
Is it their aim so to transform the state that the 
Christian life will be a possibility for every citizen, 
to realise for all Jesus' ideal of physical soundness 
and mental sanity, to make the house a Christian 
home, to invite the denizens of city lanes and 
country by-ways to partake freely of the rich feast 
of things material, intellectual, and spiritual, that 
God is daily providing in ever greater abundance. 

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Caesar's Sphere and God's 

If Jesus separated between the things of Caesar 
and the things of God, it was only that the Church 
might more effectively mould the life of the state. 
In large measure the state makes us : the Church 
must make the state. It is in the state our Christian 
lives have to be lived : we must Christianise the state. 
Until we can stand before the members of our 
community, before all of them, knowing what they 
are and the lives they have to live, and say without 
conscious irony "My brother " and "My sister," 
there is work for the Church to do in the state. 



239 



CHAPTER XXIII 
Who Veileth his Eyes 

In the New Testament record there is no sphere in 
which devotion to Jesus shows itself earlier or more 
effectively than the economic, no sphere in which the 
sincerity of the devotion is more severely tested. 
Economic questions, and not least money questions, 
have largely changed their form since Biblical times. 
Along with the vast increase of material wealth there 
has been a corresponding development in the forms 
and functions of the money which represents 
wealth. Not only are the avenues to wealth far 
broader and more easily trodden than in ancient 
times, but the power given by wealth is far more 
varied. 

In our day every man with money is to that extent 
a king. The products of all men's labour, the 
services of all men's hands and brains, are freely 
at his disposal. He who has acquired wealth 
in its modern form of money does not require to use 
his wealth ; it is enough to let other people make 
use of it. Then he sits down on his throne and 
waits till the workers of the world come and fling 
their gifts at his feet. The modern wealthy man 
has solved the problem of how to spend without 
becoming poorer. 

240 



Who Veileth his Eye 

" He is like to a tree 

Planted by runlets of water, 
'Yielding its fruit in due season, 
With leafage that fadeth never." 1 

He eats each year the fruit of that year but his tree . 
remains. In the Gospels the aspect of money most 
emphasised is its power to divert us from the pursuit 
of the ideal ; under modern conditions its seductive 
influence is greater than ever. 

Perhaps the most prominent feature in the attitude 
to money of Jesus and the apostles is their splendid 
indifference to it. As we read the story it is only an 
occasional reference such as that directing the twelve 
to make no pecuniary provision for their journey 2 
that reminds us there were economic questions 
involved in the sacred ministry. We never see Jesus 
handling a coin except as a text, and in that case he 
has to ask a loan of one. 3 The only piece of work for 
which any member of the apostle circle received a 
money payment was the betrayal by Judas of his 
Master. 4 V 

Nothing withers the influence of the professional 
religionist or philanthropist more certainly than the 
suspicion that his good works involve him in a larger 
bill for income-tax than he would have in any other 
occupation. Jesus displayed His usual knowledge 
of human nature when He kept Himself and His 
followers free from any pecuniary entanglement 
with those they tried to influence. " Silver and 
gold have I none/ '5 w T as neither a proud boast nor a 

1 Ps. il. > Matt. io9. J Mark 12*5. 4 Mark 14". 5 Acts 3 6 . 

241 

16 



Jesus and Life 

shame-faced confession, but a statement of policy. 
The very thought of a possible money payment for 
the miracles or the teaching of Jesus shocks us ; 
and apparently the people whom Jesus taught and 
healed felt the incompatibility as instinctively as 
we do. 

In the anointing at Bethany it was neither Jesus 
nor the apostles that marred the fragrance of the 
ointment by estimating the cost.* 

We are living in a world where money and all that 
money stands for are indispensable at every turn ; 
but Jesus and His immediate followers moved on a 
level where the thought of money is an intrusion. 
This indifference to money was characteristic of 
Jesus' attitude to the whole of the material side of 
life. Whether as a rule He and the apostles fared 
well or ill on their journeys we do not know. The 
Gospel writers were not interested in the question, 
and apparently the men of whom they wrote were 
not interested ; they had bigger things to think 
about. The Christian evangelist does not go " from 
house to house"* in search of more hospitable enter- 
tainment. But this indifference is simply forgetful- 
ness under the pressure of higher interests. It is 
poles apart from the ascetic's concentration on and 
fear of life's good things. 

Jesus has shown once for all that a life supremely 
great may also be supremely simple. Yet His 
simplicity was the simplicity not of the desert but of 
the village or even of the city. His work depended 

1 Mark 145. » Luke io7. 

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Who Veileth his Eyes 

on the hospitality of women who were well-to-do, 
it may be. in some cases wealthy. 1 There is no 
indication that Jesus resented or failed to appreciate 
the treasures of wealth, and beauty, and loving 
service, that had been lavished on the Temple. His 
final ideal is always the full life for all, though this 
may involve the empty life or the maimed life for 
many. 

Jesus takes us to the heart of the question in the 
story of the Rich Fool.* The fields of a wealthy 
farmer or land-owner had borne bigger crops than 
usual, so that there was a surplus. The problem 
was then : how to dispose of the surplus. All 
advancement in refinement in art or science or litera- 
ture, we might almost say all progress in character 
and the spiritual life, are conditional on the possession 
of something " over and above " the means of 
satisfying our purely animal wants, on successful 
emergence from the primitive struggle for food and 
shelter and clothing. The way in which individuals, 
classes, or nations, use the surplus is a revelation of 
what they are, and a stepping-stone to what they are 
to be. 

The story of the Rich Fool is Jesus' answer to the 
question : What not to do with the surplus. Many 
of the tragedies of the Gospels are tragedies of 
thoughtlessness ; but this fool is a calculating fool. 
He holds a full-dress debate with himself : " What 
am I to do, for I don't know where to put all my 
crops ?" The man has not sufficient imagination 

1 Luke 8**. 1 Lukei2 l6 ff. 

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Jesus and Life 

to realise that anyone besides himself may be entitled 
to a share. The abounding fertility of his fields was 
a gift of God : in disposing of the fruits God was not 
in all his thoughts. Labourers had co-operated with 
him in producing the crops : they were not to co- 
operate with him in dividing them ; not at least 
beyond their bargain. Does not the law say the 
produce is his ? 

Even if he is to make a purely selfish use of his 
wealth, there is an unselfish kind of selfishness which 
by raising the whole tone of one's life reverberates 
for good among one's neighbours. But this farmer 
is one of those whose sole criterion of the value of a 
thing is what it will fetch at an auction ; and beauty 
and truth are difficult to inventory. 

His wealth was a positive embarrassment to him ; 
and as the result of his excogitations, he reaches this 
priceless gem of thought : "If your granaries are 
no longer big enough to hold all your corn, pull them 
down and build bigger granaries." We are entitled 
to laugh at him, if we are sure we have never 
measured a man by the size of his house. Some have 
been convinced that size is God's measure of value, 
and have found it difficult to believe the Christian 
Gospel because -the earth on which the drama is 
played makes relatively to the material universe so 
small a stage. 

The rich fool thought only of himself, and only of 
one aspect of himself, his body. In a world where 
we need God and need each other all the time, he as- 
pired to be independent, independent of God and of 

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Who Veileth his Eyes 

man and of life's vicissitudes. He played for safety, 
the safety of his food and drink and merry-making. 
He had insured his income " for many years." He 
had no love for work ; the moment his future seemed 
secure he retired. In a working world he treated 
life as a perpetual holiday ; in a transient world he 
shaped his course as .if he were immortal. His 
choice leads first to a work of destruction : he 
proposes to pull down his granaries which were 
large enough for his needs ; and secondly to waste ; 
he will squander men's time and labour and much 
material in building large new granaries that will 
typify his ideal. 

Jesus saw deeper into life than the old psalmists 
and prophets, but He shares their conviction that 
life always pays back. The factors in life the farmer 
had forgotten refused to be forgotten. He had 
crowded God out of his life ; but God with tragic 
suddenness enters it. When God speaks, it is about 
the rich man's soul : " Fool, this very night your 
soul they demand from you." Till that moment he 
had forgotten that he had a soul. u They demand." 
Who demand ? Unknown people or spirits demand 
his soul from a man who had refused to acknowledge 
that either people or spirits had any relation to him 
except to feed and amuse him. 

He had magnified his body and even mistaken it 
for himself ; now he has no further use for it. And 
the crowning irony is that he is compelled in spite of 
himself to be a public benefactor ; his stored-up 
wealth passes to others. He had chosen not to 

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work ; he is no longer allowed to work. He had 
forgotten eternity ; eternity thrusts itself on him. 

The story reminds us of other men who made 
shipwreck of their lives because they had something 
to spare : the boors who refused the invitation to the 
Great Supper. 1 They were not bad men as the world 
counts badness. They were all well-to-do men 
extending their responsibilities. All three had an 
engrossing preoccupation. They were not hungry ; 
hence the great refusal. The supper of the Kingdom 
is for those who have an appetite for it. The one 
thing in common among the guests who ultimately 
filled the supper-table was hunger. 

Yet the Gospel records themselves remind us that 
the desire for wealth is not the simple phenomenon 
we sometimes think it. It is as complex as life 
itself. A man or woman may seek wealth to gratify 
lust or to build a synagogue, to live a life of self- 
indulgent ease or to anoint the Saviour, to gratify 
vanity and love of power or to be able to offer 
hospitality to the saints of God, to purchase service 
or to have leisure and means to feed the hungry, 
befriend the sick, the prisoner, and the homeless. 
Some men pursue wealth in the same spirit as the 
hunter scours the African jungle. It is a matter of 
statistical fact that one of the most powerful of all 
motives for gaining or saving money is the desire to 
leave a competence to one's wife and family. 

Nor must we too readily assume that poverty, 
either in fact or in the teaching of Jesus, is in itself 

* Luke 14 ««». 

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Who Veileth his Eyes 

conducive to spiritual health. Jesus was at pains to 
comfort the poor, who were in sore need of comfort, 
hemmed in and down-trodden as they were, despised 
by others and in danger of despising themselves, 
excluded even from the possibility of obeying what 
they were taught was God's Law. Poverty brings 
its own temptations, the temptation to sordidness, 
dishonesty, selfishness, even cruelty. " Givu us 
to-day our bread for the morrow" 1 is vitally con- 
nected with " Lead us not into temptation." * 
Jesus was hungry when His first temptation came to 
Him. 3 If we are not to worry about life's necessaries, 
it is only because our Father knows all about them.4 

One of poverty's chief dangers is the temptation 
to become a receiver, always a receiver, Jesus 
welcomed with glad praise the sturdy independence 
of the widow who would not let her abject poverty 
shut her out of the joy of giving. 5 In life and in 
death Jesus was indebted to the service of the 
wealthy and the well-to-do : the family at Bethany,* 
the woman who anointed Him,7 the women who made 
the domestic arrangements for the apostle circle, 8 
Joseph of Arimathea9, and Nicodemus. 10 Yet Jesus 
denounced woe to the rich" and consistently dwelt 
on riches as a source of temptation. And we cannot 
help asking ; Is this justified by the facts of life ? 

1 Matt. 6". Dr. Mofifatt's translation. * Matt. 6 1 *. 

3 Matt. 4*. 4 Matt. 63*. 5 Mark I24iff 

6 Luke 1038. 7 Mark 14&. 8 Luke 8**. 

9 Matt. 2757«". " John 1939. " Luke 6*4. 

247 ' 



Jesus and Life 

Those who know how hard and cruel the world can 
be to the poor, who iiave seen the bitter struggles of 
women and children left without their natural 
protectors, those who have tried to take any part in 
the work of uplifting men and been handicapped at 
every turn by want of material resources, inevitably 
ask : Does not Jesus exaggerate one aspect of riches 
and the search for riches to the exclusion of many 
other aspects which they equally possess ? This 
would be quite in accordance with His method of 
teaching. 

We have seen how as the environment becomes 
progressively Christianised, many of the hardest 
sayings of Jesus gradually lose their point. The 
cleavage between the claims of Jesus and the claims 
of family, between the things of God and the things 
of Caesar, becomes less and less acute, till a Christian 
in the West to-day may go through the whole of his 
life without ever once having to make a conscious 
choice ; and the sayings of Jesus on these subjects 
seem like echoes from a distant and foreign past, not 
as they often still are in heathen countries, voices 
from the living present. 

A Christian conscience is being gradually and even 
rapidly developed on the subjects both of poverty 
and wealth. As the spirit of Jesus gradually prevails 
poverty will be shorn of much of its terror, and 
wealth we may presume will lose much of its attrac- 
tiveness. May we not even contemplate a time, 
perhaps in the not distant future, when the mere 
possession of great riches will be considered as 

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Who Veileth his Eyes 

indecent as the vulgar display of them is now ? 
Yet, provided we remember that Jesus had no 
interest in giving an exhaustive treatment of the 
subject, but that His paramount concern was to 
warn us of the dangers involved in the possession and 
the pursuit of wealth, every word He uttered is as 
valid for us as for the original audiences. 

Of the pitfalls into which riches or the search for 
them may lead us, Jesus dwells specially on two, both 
illustrated in the story of the crestfallen young ruler. 1 
The economist distinguishes between internal and 
external wealth, and in this he is simply following 
the guidance of Jesus. Jesus always urged men to 
distinguish between the wealth which becomes a 
part of us, and the wealth which must remain for 
ever outside of us, which can decay or be stolen, and 
is left behind us when we die. The affection of our 
friends, the gratitude of those we have helped, the 
temptation resisted that has raised our whole life to 
a higher plane, these things are of the essential 
wealth that abides. Land, houses, and bank 
accounts are detachable ; and only when we are 
asked to detach them do we realise the grip they 'have 
of us. 

Turning over the pages of the Gospels reminds us 
of the consulting room of a famous physician. As 
the patients pass one after the other into the presence 
of the great man, one who had looked in casually on 
account of what he thought a slight ailment receives 
his death sentence ; and another who thought he 

* Mark io*7f'. 
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Jesus and Life 

was the victim of a fatal disease is relieved to find he 
is suffering from some common and trifling malady. 
If we have ever really come into contact with Jesus, 
we have once in a life- time seen ourselves as we are. 
Our Lord did not judge the rich young ruler ; He 
said not a word about his character ; but He had 
given him a lamp by the light of which he could 
judge himself. 

The demand that Jesu Smade from the ruler must 
have seemed to him an impossible, not to say absurd, 
demand. He was neither a sensualist nor an 
unkindly landlord. His wealth gave him time and 
opportunity to attend to the claims of religion. 
How could making himself a beggar increase his 
fitness for the Kingdom ? Jesus saw that with his 
earnestness, his blameless past, and his training, 
he would make a welcome addition to the disciple 
circle. If He had in the main chosen comparatively 
uneducated men as His apostles, it was not because 
they were uneducated ; and for all their receptiveness 
they were often dull and wayward pupils. What a 
Gospel the rich ruler might have written had he 
ceased to be the rich ruler and followed Jesus ! 
Just as Levi was a centre for the movement among 
the tax-gatherers and the two pairs of brothers for 
the mission to the peasants and fishermen of Galilee, 
so this young man might have opened up the way for 
a ministry among the educated and the wealthy, 
whom we cannot but suppose Jesus wanted to win. 

Why did Jesus make it a condition that he should 
renounce his wealth ? We may dismiss the idea that 

250 



Who Veileth his Eyes 

3ur Lord made this demand simply because it was 
the most painful thing He could ask the ruler to do, 
In the Middle Ages the so-called saints treated their 
followers in this way 1 : we have missed much in the 
teaching of Jesus if we can imagine Him playing with 
the pain of an earnest man hesitating between the 
choice of life and death. Jesus again cannot have 
meant that the possession of the estate was in itself 
sinful ; otherwise it would have been wrong to sell 
it to another owner. Nor can Jesus mean that no 
wealthy man can enter the Kingdom. Zacchaeus 
in addition to making generous restitution of his 
ill-gotten gains gave only half his wealth to the poor, 
and he was warmly welcomed as a disciple.* 

It is clear that a rich man in the apostle circle, 
however earnest, might have been more of a hind- 
rance than a help. A large part of Jesus' ministry 
was a Gospel of hope and comfort for the poor ; 
but wealthy men do not carry conviction when they 
preach hope and comfort to the poor ; nor is this 
the only subject on which their mouths are closed. 
A man with an estate to attend to could have given 
only half his mind to his work as a pupil of Jesus ; 
Jesus wanted undistracted service. Had there 
been in the apostle circle a man with an unlimited 
supply of loaves and fishes, the multitudes would 
soon have learned to come for a share ; and whether 
the rich man had given or refused to give, the result 
would have been equally disastrous to the spiritual 
ministry. It may well be too that Jesus saw his 

1 See Black, "Culture and Restraint/' p. 265. [1 Luke 19^. 

251 



Jesus and Life 

soul was being strangled by pride and trust in his 
wealth and position. 

How far is Jesus' hard saying to the rich ruler 
applicable to all candidates for discipleship ? It 
is one of the paradoxes of Christianity that our 
willingness to part from our material resources for 
Jesus' sake measures the degree in which we may 
safely keep them under our own control. Everyone 
who has ever been a guest in a wealthy and refined 
home, where the whole atmosphere was fragrant 
with the spirit of Christian love and service, must 
have had the gravest doubt whether the master or 
mistress of the home would have been helping the 
world by handing over their wealth to any charity, 
however wisely administered ; may we not even say, 
would have felt quite certain that this would have 
been a misuse of their wealth ? The difficulty is 
that so few accept in its entirety Jesus' teaching that 
we are only stewards of our possessions. Wealthy 
people in the Gospels always appear as giving or 
expected to give ; no function of wealth is recognised 
but its power to lighten the lot of others. 

Contrast the story of the rich ruler with the story 
of the anointing by the woman who was "a sinner." 1 
He was a man of piety ; she was famous for the 
wickedness of her life. He had kept all the com- 
mandments : she had broken them all. He was 
admired and honoured by all, a welcome addition to 
any company : she was despised by all ; her presence 
brought defilement, her touch pollution. Both came 

* Luke 7IK 

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Who Veileth his Eyes 

with enthusiasm to the feet of Jesus ; he left crest- 
fallen ; she left forgiven. He could not give up his 
wealth when asked : she unasked freely poured out 
of her treasure. 

The second danger of riches on which Jesus dwells 
is only another aspect of the same. The stern 
realities amid which most men live are so screened 
off from the rich man, he lives in such a haze of 
conscious and unconscious flattery, deception, and 
self-deception, that it is all but impossible for him 
to see things or people as they are. Least of all can 
he see himself as he is. 

The possession of wealth tends to close our eyes to 

the sufferings of the multitudes who have no wealth, 

to prejudice us in our enquiries into the causes of 

their poverty and our good fortune, and into any 

claims they may have on us. There is a Hebrew 

proverb : — 

" He that gives to the poor shall not come to want, 
But who veileth his eyes shall have many a curse." i 

There are various ways of veiling our eyes. We 
may live in the West End and assume that the poor 
man no longer exists because we do not see him. A 
not uncommon plan is the adoption of a system of 
theology which teaches that poverty is the result of 
vice and wealth the just reward of virtue, so that 
there is nothing to worry about. We may turn 
" The poor ye have always with you "» into a 
prophecy, and console ourselves with the reflection 
that in trying to preserve their poverty in all its 

1 Prov. 28»7. » Mark 147. 

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Jesus and Life 

unadorned simplicity we are fulfilling Scripture. 
Statistics also, that "strong tower from the enemy/' 1 
may be relied on to show how hopeless it is for one 
man to try to accomplish anything. 

Nothing in the whole range of New Testament 
teaching on wealth is clearer than that any kind of 
living contact with Jesus invariably led to a new 
interest in the poor, a new understanding and 
recognition of their claims, a fresh outburst of 
liberality. It was the first subject on which the 
conscience of Zacchaeus was touched. * When Jesus 
told the rich ruler to sell all and give to the poor,3 
was He thinking only of the young man's soul ? 
Was He not thinking also of the poor, wanting the 
ruler to think of the poor, whom with all his goodness 
he had contrived to forget ? Dives always shut his 
eyes when he passed Lazarus, the eyes of his mind at 
least. 4 Jesus wants us to go through life with our 
eyes open, and when we see a poor man to see in him 
a poor man. The controversy whether or no the 
first Christians adopted the principle of communisms 
has little interest for us. The important point is 
that the Jerusalem Church felt instinctively that a 
community, in which some members were starving 
while others had more than enough, whatever else 
it might be, was not a Christian Church. For all our 
Christian giving or refusal to give, there is only one 
Christian principle, to remember that the eye of 
Jesus is on us as we pass the treasury. 6 

1 Ps. 6i3b. 2 Luke 19 8 . 3 Mark io* 1 . 

4 Luke i6«» *5. 5 Acts 244*; ^3* ff . 6 Mark I24 1 . 

254 



Who Veileth his Eyes 

Jesus knew poverty from the inside : yet His whole 
attitude to it was one of sympathy, comfort, encour- 
agement. There are other things that require to 
be said to the poor and of the poor ; things that 
Jesus knew as well as any charity organiser cam 
know ; but these things are an impertinence on 
the lips of any, save one whose whole life testifies 
that his essential attitude to poverty is the under- 
standing, admiring, pitying sympathy of Jesus. 
Jesus put the rich and learned Pharisees in the 
pillory for all succeeding generations to scoff at : there 
is not a beggar in Gospel story that is not pictured 
in a kindly light. There were pious Pharisees and 
scoundrel beggars ; but Jesus knew where our short- 
sightedness requires the emphasis to be placed. 

The history of the progress of the Gospel has been 
the story of the gradual opening of the eyes of the 
blind to see people who had been there all the time 
though we had not noticed them ; to see them with 
the eyes of Jesus : the Gentile world, the sick in 
body, the afflicted in mind, slaves, criminals, the 
" heathen/' children. God's call to the Church 
to-day is to open our eyes to the poor : not so much 
to the abjectly poor ; we can hardly shut them out 
of our lives if we would. 

The people to whom the rich and the comfortable 
classes have to reconsider their relation are not poor 
in the old sense at all. But they are miserably poor 
in this sense : that they are living in a world in which 
riches are multiplying as they never multiplied 
before ; it is their work in life to help to multiply 

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Jesus and Life 

them : but a flaming whirling sword guards every 
avenue to the Garden of Eden which is full in their 
view. Their faculties are trained to enjoy the 
good things of life as the faculties of their forefathers 
were not trained. The feast is spread before them 
and their appetites are whetted, but for the most 
part it is to a Barmecide banquet the world invites 
them. 

It is not great wealth that revolts the Christian 
conscience, but great wealth side by side with great 
poverty ; especially when the wealth is only 
accumulated at the expense of the poverty. The 
first Christians immediately realised that this was 
true in the Church. Only a little time was needed to 
convince them that it was hardly less true when the 
Christian compared himself with those outside the 
Church. " Let us work for the benefit of all, but 
especially of the family of the faith." 1 

When we have said everything that can be said of 
the needs of the leaders of industry, and of those 
who are doing the intellectual work of the world ; 
the importance to them of comfortable surroundings, 
freedom from pecuniary anxiety, plentiful service, 
books and pictures, foreign travel ; when we have 
told our consciences that those who work with their 
hands have no need of these things ; the sum and 
substance of it all is that the situation is impossible, 
impossible in a. community that makes any claim 
to be guided by th^ principles of Jesus. To Christ- 
ianise our social relations will involve not merely 

* Gal.6». 

256 



Who Veileth his Eyes 

changes but vital changes, in our whole method of 
producing, .distributing, and consuming wealth. 

There is often more in our preaching than we 
ourselves are conscious of. Those to whom we 
proclaim the Gospel sometimes carry it out to logical 
inferences that had escaped ourselves. We have 
preached that life and the world are good ; that each 
man is of infinite significance, and that God is no 
respecter of persons ; and the world, even the world 
outside the Church, has taken us seriously, more 
seriously perhaps than some of us meant to be taken. 
A new movement has begun. The Church may stand 
aloof, or may oppose, or may throw herself into the 
new movement and seek to keep it on Christian lines. 
The attitude of the Church will help to shape her 
own destiny as well as the destiny of the world. It 
is always well to ask ourselves, whether there is 
anything in our own social position, or in the means 
by which the Church obtains the material requisites 
of her work, that will tend to warp our judgment on 
social and industrial problems 



257 ' 

IT 



CHAPTER XXIV 

Four Attitudes to the Brother 

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, 1 a story which 
is the final answer to the question why He taught the 
people in parables, Jesus has given us His Social 
Gospel. It is not only a lesson in philanthropy ; 
Jesus goes further and asks why philanthropy is 
necessary. He portrays the four attitudes to our 
fellow-men : the robbers who create the problem, 
the priest and the Levite who ignore it, the inn-keeper 
who treats it professionally, and the Good Samaritan 
who solves it. 

The robbers are typical of a class of people who in 
presence of a fellow-creature have but one question 
to ask : What can I get out of this man ? To use 
the language of the socialist, to them a neighbour 
is a person to be exploited. These robbers in our day 
are a large and flourishing class. Among them we 
recognise the employer, who whatever 1 the rate of 
profits may be has only one rule of wages, the least 
he can get men to work for : the landlord who regards 
his tenants simply as rent-payers ; shareholders 
whose one aim is dividends and who are not at all 
curious how these dividends are obtained ; workmen 

1 Luke io3°ff. 

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Four Attitudes to the Brother 

whose motto is the largest possible amount of pay 
for the smallest possible amount of work ; drink- 
sellers who are as tender of the weak brother as the 
apostle Paul., since the weaker the brother, the bigger 
their profits. 

This spirit which makes human beings into 
economic beasts of prey, with flesh and blood like 
themselves as the victims, if not the whole root of the 
trouble, is responsible for a sufficient quantity of it 
to warrant Jesus in singling it out as He did. Nor 
is it only in our economic lives we exploit each other. 
The pleasures we esteem so lightly are often obtained 
at the expense of more deadly injury to our brother 
or our sister than robbing them of their goods. 

It is a true instinct that makes Jesus represent the 
robbers as beating the traveller as well as robbing 
him. Presumably it was only his belongings they 
wanted ; but in order to get them, they had to 
disable him. When we set out on any course of 
selfishness we never quite see where it will lead us to. 
All we can be sure of is that it will lead us further 
than we want to go. People who do cruel things 
are often far more cruel than they mean to be, or are 
conscious of being. Having stripped the traveller 
and half killed him, the robbers " went off and left 
him," Since there was nothing more to be got 
from him, they recognised no further relation to 
him. He passed out of their lives ; at least they 
thought so. 

Here then we have the " social problem/' in all 
its pain and ugliness. To label it is to be half recon- 

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ciled to it. Jesus has shown us how the difficulty 
arises. Next He shows us how not to solve it. The 
prescription of the priest and the Levite for dealing 
with the robbed and half-dead traveller is the simplest 
ever proposed. They simply turn their eyes away. 
To them for all practical purposes the traveller no 
longer exists. The charge that the Church ignores 
the man who is down is one with which, whether just 
or unjust, we in our day are familiar. 

We lose the point if we think of the priest and the 
Levite as being bad men ; still more if we regard 
them as cruel men. They were conventional men, 
who no doubt discharged quite worthily the duties 
of their profession and their station according to 
their light and the expectations of the circle to which 
they belonged. They could have passed a searching 
examination in the Old Testament Scriptures, or at 
least in those portions of them which interested 
priests. They were experts on the Temple ritual, 
and could keep anxious enquirers straight on any 
point connected with the sacrifices. They could 
have told the precise significance of every detail of 
the priestly and levitical robes, and shown the 
importance of preserving these details in their 
pristine purity from age to age. But they would not 
shock society by being good in unconventional ways. 
A half-naked unconscious man, covered with blood, 
lying by the side of the road, was outside of their 
routine. They thought it best to go on. 

It was no accident that the method of dealing with 
the wounded traveller by ignoring him was ascribed 

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Four Attitudes to the Brother 

by Jesus to two typical ritualists. It is in accordance 
with His whole attitude to the ceremonialists of the 
time. No one who knows anything of the high- 
ways and by-ways of Christian service to-day would, 
suggest for a moment that devotion to the external 
accompaniments of worship is incompatible with 
the spirit that seeks out and tries to save at whatever 
cost the unloveliest of our fellow-creatures. Yet 
Jesus distinctly teaches that in His experience the 
two are antagonistic. Was this true only of the 
ritualism of His own day, or is it in the very nature of 
all materialising of worship to concentrate attention 
on sacrifice rather than on mercy ? 

The disciples of the priest and the Levite still 
abound among us. They solved the- problem of 
slavery by telling us that black people have not 
feelings like white people, and that the negroes were 
much happier as slaves than they would be as free 
men. If poor people, they tell us, got higher wages, 
they would only spend them in drink. City garrets 
are a painful subject ; but that kind of people would 
turn a palace into a slum. Beggars are not " the 
seed of the righteous,' ' which settles their problem. 
It is distressing to see so many people outside of the 
Church ; but the obvious reason is that our Church 
preaches too high and pure a Gospel for these 
worldlings. 

In Eastern lands when pestilence is claiming its 
victims by the hundred thousand and some are 
finding it hard to preach the love of God, our priests 
and Levites are not at all perplexed. The statistics, 

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Jesus and Life 

they tell us, are unreliable ; or the remedy tried last 
time was unsuccessful ; or the victims are surplus 
population who can well be dispensed with. Missions 
to "the heathen" are an expensive impertinence; 
since by an inscrutable decree of a wise Providence, 
every nation already has the religion best suited to 
it. But when we have passed him by on the other 
side the wounded traveller remains, his blood un- 
staunched, his wounds unhealed, his cry for help all 
the more poignant that it is often mute. 

It is significant that the scene took place on a 
lonely road. The priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, 
had no spectators but God. Each showed himself 
as he was, without the stimulus or the reproach of 
public opinion. 

The Samaritan who comes to the rescue is a busy 
man ; he cannot give up the whole of his time to the 
traveller, but has to call in the help of the inn-keeper. 
It is one of the extraordinarily modern touches in 
the story that the problem is finally solved by a 
combination of the amateur and the professional 
philanthropist, each making the contribution that 
he can make best. The Samaritan renders first aid. 
supplies the funds, makes all the arrangements, and 
is the inspiration of the whole story of the rescue. 

Moreover he superintends the work of the pro- 
fessional ; for when he leaves the inn, he promises 
to come back again : and the innkeeper knows that 
so thorough a person will want to know how his ward 
has been looked after in his absence. But there is 
medical work to be done, a course of nursing to be 

262 



Four Attitudes to the Brother 

undertaken, for which the Samaritan has neither 
the time, -nor, it may be, the abil: 

That the inn-keeper is a professional is not intended 
as a point against him.. Like any other workman 
he is worthy of his wages. The Samaritan try. 
him and presumably his trust is well founded. If 
the Samaritan is to carry out his kindly project, the 
p of the inn-keeper is indispensable. And yet, 
the hero of the story is not the inn-keeper but the 
Samaritan. 

An inn-keeper may be himself a Good Samaritan ; 
though he earns his living by keeping the inn, he 
may tend the wounded travellers brought to him as 
carefully and lovingly as any amateur philanthropist. 
Yet every one who has any acquaintance with the 
working of public institutions at home or abroad 
knows that when the administration of kindness is 
left to paid agents, there is no certainty that the 
work is being carried out in the spirit of the Good 
Samaritan. It is not enough to strike a bargain with 
the inn-keeper. There is need for the Samaritan 
whose great heart of love has set in motion the 
whole system to come back again to the inn, to see 
that his generous purpose is not being frustrated by 
hired service, to try to inspire the inn-keeper with 
something of his own self-sacrificing devotion. 

To the robbers the traveller was a victim to be 
exploited ; to the priest and the Levite a nuisance 
to be evaded ; to the inn-keeper he was a business 
proposition ; to the Samaritan he was a neighbour 
to be helped. The kindness of most of us has its 

263 



Jesus and Life 

strict limitations. Jesus is emphatic that the 
wounded traveller wiU never be restored to his place 
in society by men who are always asking whether 
they have not done enough. The Samaritan did not 
stop till he had done everything that the situation 
called for. 

He used his skill : he took trouble ; he gave his 
time : he risked his life ; he exercised thought and 
forethought on the sick man's behalf. When he left 
the traveller, he left him in good hands. He paid 
all expenses ; yet there was no extravagance. He 
gave what he thought was necessary, but promised 
to make good any deficit. He promised to come 
back and see his ward. The Samaritan was not 
doing good to relieve an uneasy conscience ; his 
only thought was to help the traveller and to help 
him all he could. 

Why did the priest and the Levite fail ? We do 
not know. No doubt they had some excellent 
excuse ; but the best excuse in the world for neglect- 
ing a duty is never just the same as doing it. They 
failed because some selfish interest of their own 
would have suffered had they stopped to tend the 
traveller. The Samaritan succeeded because he 
did not think of himself at all. To him the traveller 
was not " the social problem,'' but a fellow creature 
in distress. He was " moved with compassion. " 
That made all the difference. 

The story illustrates among other things the 
hollowness of the distinction we sometimes draw 
between spiritual work and social work. Was the 

264 



Four Attitudes to the Brother 

Samaritan a Christian missionary or a social 
reformer ?• Who can tell, and who can tell what 
either of the phrases means in such a connection ? 

It is significant that the scene is not laid on a 
battle-field or in a plague-stricken town. It is a 
story of one victim of oppression on a lonely road. 
If we are ever to help those who have gone under 
we must help them one by one, as men, not as 
" cases. " And the Samaritan was not out looking for 
adventures. The incident happened in the course of 
his day's work. But he was bearing his cross, and 
was ready for the call when it came. 

Like all the other parables of Jesus this story is not 
a compendium either of theology or of ethics. It 
leaves many questions unanswered, questions even 
which naturally arise out of the story. Jesus was 
an artist, and He was not so much afraid for the Ark 
as man}' of His followers. His teaching is always 
for those who have ears to hear. As for the others, 
let them grow ears. 

The Samaritan's work is not finished till he has 
dealt with the robbers, who in the meantime are 
robbing and assaulting other travellers ; but that is 
another story. The priest and the Levite are not 
explained nor is any comment made on them. They 
appear for a moment ; then pass on for ever, leaving 
behind them the grim sense of irrevocable choice made. 

We want to know why the Good Samaritan did 
what he did. What was his motive ? It is 
characteristic that no word is said of this. There 
is no appeal to brotherhood or the common Fatherhood 

265 



Jesus and Life 

of God. And Jesus was right. If one is not moved, 
by the mere recital of what he did, with all his heart 
to go and do likewise, any " motive " with which 
theology might supply him would leave him cold. 

For practical guidance we are particularly anxious 
to know what became of the wounded traveller when 
he recovered. Was the work of the Samaritan 
simply palliative and superficial ; or did he go to the 
root of things and try not merely to patch up the 
traveller but to make him a new man ? His work 
is unfinished till the traveller himself becomes a 
Samaritan. Even in His miracles Jesus never 
worked entirely from the outside. The patient must 
at least be receptive ; and either the patient or his 
friends must co-operate with that response of the 
whole nature which the Gospels call faith. This we 
can say : that every act, gesture, tone, and look of 
the Samaritan bore witness to the love of God. The 
traveller has come within the range of the most 
powerful of all preaching. Henceforth the respon- 
sibility is his. 

One more question of primary importance for our 
present social organisation is suggested by the story, 
though for light on it we must turn rather to the 
whole trend of the teaching of Jesus. The Good 
Samaritan had some command of money. How he 
acquired that money is irrelevant to the story. But 
it is not irrelevant to ask whether in earning or gain- 
ing the money he exhibited the same spirit as he 
exhibited in spending it. Generally speaking the 
theory that underlies our present system is that in 

266 



Four Attitudes to the Brother 

our business lives we are bound by considerations of 
honesty/justice, and fair play ; and only after our 
income is actually in our pocket can we afford to 
listen to the claims, supposed to be of a loftier and 
more or less optional morality, of generosity and 
kindness. Does the story leave it possible for us to 
imagine that the Samaritan's goodness deserted him 
when he donned his office coat ? 

Of all the varied influences that lead men to work, 
it is usually assumed that desire for money so pre- 
ponderates that we do not go far astray if we neglect 
all others in our calculations. In the parable of 
The Hours 1 it was an axiom to the labourers that 
the only conceivable result of more work was more 
pay. Even in the most Christian countries that 
is still the general point of view, so far as the earning 
side of our lives is concerned. 

The tradition that more and better work can only 
be evoked by offers of higher remuneration is so 
firmly established that it may seem at times as if 
nothing could shake it. But after all it is only a 
tradition ; and very little knowledge of history is 
needed to convince us that the most firmly rooted 
traditions can be overthrown. Even men of the 
world to-day have a certain contempt for mere 
money-grubbing, naked and unashamed. One 
reason why our admiration for the heroism of our 
soldiers and sailors is so unalloyed is that their 
triumphs have so often no taint of commercialism. 

One who has seen the men of our navy or our 
■ Matt. 2o"ff 
267 



Jesus and Life 

mercantile marine saving life at sea, knowing that 
their own lives were In jeopardy from moment to 
moment, yet going on with the work of rescue as 
calmly as if they were in harbour, must have realised 
keenly that a healthy tradition is even more powerful 
than desire for gain to supply altruistic motive. The 
late Dr. Smart of Glasgow University used to 
suggest that a time would come when the princes of 
manufacture and commerce would find their reward, 
not in profits and dividends, but in titles and blue 
ribbons. The idea is by no means so quixotic as 
it sounds, and it is only another step to imagine 
them dispensing even with the titles and orders. 
If the men whose profession is war work not for 
money but in a spirit of self-sacrificing heroism, it is 
surely not inconceivable that the men who follow 
peaceful pursuits might one day develop the same 
tradition. The Christian Church has already 
worked miracles in creating Good Samaritans who 
spend their substance in the spirit of Christian 
service ; its next task is to induce men to earn their 
incomes in the spirit of Christian service. 

One may discount as in no small measure a 
travesty of the facts, much in the semi-economic 
literature of the day that represents our present 
system as a wild uncontrolled struggle for existence. 
We may also have the gravest doubts of the moral, 
even more than of the economic, effects of some of the 
Utopias that seek to supplant our present industrial 
organisation, and which on a superficial view are 
based on the principle of brotherhood. Even if we 

268 



Four Attitudes to the Brother 

could believe that the sole driving power behind the 
Socialist .movement were the very spirit of the 
Good Samaritan, we have still to consider what 
would happen when the initial impulse had spent 
itself. We have only to ask the question to realise 
why Jesus advocated no political or economic 
system. There are social, political, economic 
conditions, that make the Christian life difficult or 
impossible. But it is not enough to set our house in 
order. The house makes the inmates ; but in an 
even greater degree the inmates make the house. 
Take care of the men, the women, and the children, 
and the systems will take*care of themselves. 

Whatever economic system we adopt, there are 
reproaches to be removed from nations whose sacred 
book contains the story of the Good Samaritan. We 
are living in a world where land and capital are 
essentials of existence. The vast majority of 
people in our country find themselves born into a 
system in which the entire land of the country is 
surrounded by barbed wire, and all the capital by 
boards warning off trespassers. The great bulk of 
our peope live in hired houses on hired land, and earn 
their living by becoming hired labourers working 
with hired capital. 

This is not only an economic question. It is a 
question of personality. Most of us are here only 
on sufferance. The whole attitude to us of the 
system in which we live is that of the priest and 
Levite when it is not that of the robber. We are 
treated as strangers in a strange land. We want to 

269 



Jesus and Life 

feel that we are here by right, that we too are Roman 
citizens. We claim to live in our own house, on 
our own ground ; to earn our living not by the grace 
of any man, but in our own right as citizens, in some 
business in which we can feel the magic of property, 
which, as Arthur Young said, turns sand into gold. 
We have too long been in bondage to a heathen 
legal system that magnified the rights of property. 
When our law is more fully Christianised, human 
life will have its rights too. 

The iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the 
children unto the third and fourth generation. The 
Jews thought this was a law of God. We now know 
it is in large measure an artificial arrangement of 
man. The Christian state can and must restrain the 
vicious results of heredity within their inevitable 
limits. 

In the Christian state we shall suffer the little 
children to come to Jesus, not as we do so often now, 
by the pathway of a premature grave, but by a life 
environed in beauty and love and all things whole- 
some and clean. God's trees and flowers and birds 
and clear pure air and the face of the sky will be part 
of the birthright of all God's children. There are 
talents to be sought out and cultivated with skill 
and care. No country in the world is so rich in 
ability that it can afford to leave any single talent 
uncultivated for lack of money. 

We are gradually learning the old, old lesson of 
Jesus that a bold scattering of the gifts of which God 
has made us stewards is the truest prudence. The 

270 



Four Attitudes to the Brother 

nation like the man that recklessly, yet wisely, 
scatters its* ten talents will reap an abundant reward. 
Slums and all that the slum stands for are too 
expensive luxuries for any nation to afford. Unde- 
veloped capacities are an anachronism among a 
people that has got past the stage of hoarding its 
gold in the ground. 

We have thrown ourselves with feverish energy into 
the work of developing our mineral resources, and 
in a less degree our agricultural resources ; only 
slowly and reluctantly and half-convinced have we 
begun to develop our human resources. The belief 
that the wealth of a nation is the richness of the life 
of its citizens has been of slow growth. There is 
no room in the life of our nation for economic methods 
that produce goods, but do not produce men with 
sound body and brain and heart. 

We cannot afford to have men or women in our 
country who are not at home in a decent house, and 
who cannot earn a decent wage. The only way to 
deal with unskilled and inefficient labour is to abolish 
it. We must educate and train and inspire and 
uplift. A Church which has caught Jesus' conception 
of the possibilities that are in men, which throws 
itself with passion and that faith which nothing can 
resist into the work of establishing neighbourly 
relations among men, is a Church that will do things. 

In the Judgment scene at the end of Matthew xxv. 
the Judge does not ignore economic questions as 
the Church has at times been inclined to do. How 
have we disposed of our superfluous food, clothing, 

271 ' 



Jesus and Life 

time and strength ? That is not only a question, but 
the only question. It is one of the many extrava- 
gances of Jesus that experience justifies. And the 
story of the widow's mites reminds us that Jesus' 
conception of where our superfluous wealth begins 
may be very different from ours. 

Love incarnate moves the heart as maxims 
cannot, The Church and the Church alone can hold 
before the minds of men in each succeeding gener- 
ation Jesus the Good Shepherd, Jesus the Good 
Samaritan, Jesus the Elder Brother, crucified for 
men and risen. 

The unknown future is not all unknown. Greed, 
and sensuality, and pride, and ambition, and 
indifference, and all unneighbourliness, will put 
forth all their strength against Jesus Risen as they 
tried to crush Him in the days of His flesh. But 
they have killed His body ; there is no more that 
they can do to Him. He is here with power. 
Calvary is God's pathway to Pentecost. In the 
world's darkest hour, we believe in God ; we believe 
also in Jesus, in whom and in whom alone, there is 
Life. 



272 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alford, Greek Testament, Vol. I. 
Expositor's Greek Testament, Vol. I. 
McNeile, Gospel according to St. Matthew. 
Plummer, Exegetical Commentary on St. Matthew. 
Menzies, The Earliest Gospel. 

Bennett, The Life of Christ according to St. Mark. 
David Smith, Mark (Westminster New Testament). 
Gould, St. Mark {International Critical Commentary). 
Plummer, St. Luke (International Critical Commentary). 
Garvie, St. Luke (Westminster New Testament). 
Dummelow, One Volume Bible Commentary. 
Denney, Jesus and the Gospel . 

, Gospel Questions and Answers 

Manson, First Three Gospels. 

Rankin, Life of Christ. 

Sanday, Life of Christ in Recent Research. 

Weinel and Widgery, Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After 

Cameron, The Renascence of Jesus. 

Swete, Studies in the Teaching of our Lord. 

Bruce : Parabolic Teaching of Jesus. 

Trench, Parables of our Lord. 

Parables of Jesus, published by James Robinson, Manchester. 

Browne, The Parables of the Gospels (Cambridge University 

Press.) 
Glover, The Jesus of History. 
David Smith, In the Days of His Flesh. 
Goldwin Smith, The Founder of Christendom. 
Rudolph Otto, Life and Ministry of Jesus 
Hector Waylen, Mountain Pathways. 
Mcintosh, The Person of Christ. 
Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus. 
Robertson, Spiritual Pilgrimage of Jesus. 
Mofiatt, The Theology of the Gospels. 
Moberly, A tonement and Personality. 
Law, The Emotions of Jesus. 

273 

18 



Bibliography 

Bruce, Kingdom of God. 

Gilbert, The Revelation of Jesus. 

A. J. Ross, The Universality of Jesus. 

Muirhead, The Eschatology of Jesus. 

Gross Alexander, The Son of Man. 

E. F. Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah. 

Hogg, Christ's Message of the Kingdom. 

Ecce Homo. 

Martensen, Christian Ethics. 

Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics. 

Stalker, The Ethic of Tesus. 

Black, Culture and Restraint. 

Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis. 

Gardner, The Ethics of Jesus and Social Progress. 

Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question. 

Social Teaching of the Bible, Edited by Samuel E. Keeble. 

Wallis, Sociological Study of the Bible. 

Kent, The Social Teachings of the Prophets and Jesus. 

— , The Wise men of Ancient Israel 

Clow, Christ in the Social Order. 

Muir, Christianity and Labour. 

Stelzle, The Church and Labour. 

G. W. Knox, The Gospel of Jesus. 

Carnegie Simpson, The Facts of Life. 

, The Fact of Christ. 

Rashdall, Conscience and Christ. 

J. E. McFadyen, The Problem of Pain. 

, Old Testament Criticism and the Christian Church 

Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man. 

Alexander, Demonic Possession. 

Martineau : Types of Ethical Theory. 

Mc Kenzie, Ethics. 

The Faith and the War, edited by Foakes- Jackson. 

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery . 

Scott and Stowe, Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilisation. 

Relevant Articles in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, Eny. 
clopcsdia Biblica, Encyclopedia Britannica t 
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. 

Marshall, Elements of Economics of Industry. 

Marshall, Principles of Economics. 



274 



INDEX 



Accommodation, Principle of, 

H3 f . 
Ambition, 178! 
Angels, 25. 
Anger, 186. 

Apostles, Silence re, 75. 
Apostles, qualifications, 85. 
Asceticism, 134^, i6if. 

Baptist, 74, i62f. 
Bartimaeus, 43, 88. 
Beelzebul, 42, 166. 
Bethany, Anointing at, 43 f, 71, 

88, 115. 
Blessings as temptations, 157, 

211, 217, 223L 

Body, Care for, 2o8ff. 
Brotherhood of Man, 176. 

Caesar, Things of, 2276*. 
Calamities, Natural, 26f, 146L 
Celibacy, 129. 

Ceremonialism, 361, 49, 26of. 
Chance, 31. 
Children, 122, 220. 
Christian workers, 178, 238I 
Christianity and the poor, 
253ff- 



Christianity as missionary 

religion, 173, i8of. 
Christianity opening the eyes 

of the blind, 42, 871, 255. 
Christianity, Unique morality 

of, 175- 
Church, 224. 
Church and State, 2276% 
Church and war, 205f . 
Church in economic and social 

life, 268fL 
Colour question, 975. 
Conventionality, 41, 260. 
Crime, 94. 
Cross as symbol of Christianity, 

150. 
Cross-bearing, 1511!. 
Crowd, The, 90L 

Death, 25, 30, 2oof. 
Democratic ideal, 82L 
Demons, 23f, 166, 170. 
Determination, 43. 
Difficulties of Gospels, 50. 
Dives and Lazarus, 41, 71, 210, 

254- 
Divorce, ngi. 



Elder brother, 35. 

275 ' 



Index 



Environment being Christian- 
ised, 248. 

Epileptic boy, 168. 

Epistles, Relation to Gospels, 
77- 

Equality, Human, 82fL 

Eschatology, 159ft, 165. 

Exploiting one's neighbour, 
258. 

Faith, 28-31, io5f. 

Fear, 2 iff. 

Figurative language, 581!. 

Following Jesus, literally and 

figuratively, 151. 
Force, Physical, 203L 
Forgiving enemies, i82ff. 

Gravitation, Spiritual, 177. 
Great supper, 246. 

Hatred, 1771". 

Health, Physical, 2o8f . 

Hedonism, 136. 

Home, i3ofif, 2i3fL 

Hours, Parable of, 19, 6gi, 

93, 267. 
Humour, 46f. 
Hyperbole, 60. 

Ignoring social problems, 260. 
Imitation of Christ, 152. 
India, Analogy with Palestine, 

228-230. 
Inn-keeper, 263. 
Interims-Ethik, 160. 
Irony, 59. 



Jesus as host, 15. 
Jesus as legislator, 5 if. 
Jesus as teacher, 5of. 
Jesus' death and resurrection, 

168-173. 
Jesus misunderstood, 60. 
Jesus, Person of, 76L 
Jesus' attitude to 

the crowd, 90. 

foreigners, 88. 

heathen, 84. 

His home circle, 218. 

learning, 90. 

money, 240! 

the poor, 255. 

rank, 86. 

wealth, 86f. 
Jesus' exposure of the Phari- 
sees, 185I 
Job, 26, 141, 145, 148. 
Judas, 19, 37, 75, 179. 

Kingdom of God, 15811, 165ft, 
234L 

Life, 135, 8off. 
Life, Future, 74. 
Literalism, 62ff. 
Lord's table, 95. 

Man, Significance of, 80. 

Marriage, 119ft. 

Married women, Status of, 

214L 
Martha and Mary, 71, n6ff. 
Missions, 68f, 105, 128, 237. 



276 



Index 



Money, 2406 

Money as -motive in industry 

and commerce, 265-268. 
Money, Use of in charity, 232f. 
Moral end, 134. 
Morality, Relative, I28f. 
Moses, Jesus' relation to, I26f. 
Motive in Gospels, j$i. 
Mustard seed, 64. 

Xeo-Malthusianism, 13 if. 
New Testament as missionary 

book, 173, 194. 
Non-resistance, 188. 

Optimism, i8f, I05f. 
Old Testament, Relation of 
Church to, 79. 

Pacifism, 197^. 

Pain, 17-19, 150, 151ft, 202f. 

Parabolic method, 62. 

Patriotism, 226. 

Pentecost, 172. 

Pharisees, 37, 41, 51, 185. 

Pharisee and publican, 81. 

Police, 204. 

Poverty, 81, 86ff, 2466% 255^. 

Prayer, Misunderstood, 180. 

Preaching, Unsuspected corol- 
laries of, 257. 

Prodigal Son, 335, 64, 85, in, 
174, 182. 

Professional philanthropy, 262. 

Prudence, 44, 270. 

Race suicide, 13 if. 



Racial antagonism, 975. 

Recklessness, 43, 271. 

Revenge, 1875. 

Rewards, 45. 

Rich fool, 2435 . 

Rights of Christians, 194I 

Ritualism, see Ceremonialism. 

Robbers, 258. 

Ruler, rich young, 45, 86f, 249, 

252f. 

Runners of the Gospel story, 
42. 

Samaritan, Good, 19, 71, 174, 

176, 181, 209, 2585. 
Satan, 24, i65f, 167I 
Self-development, 134^. 
Sex, 120. 

Silence of Gospels, 7 iff. 
Siloam, Fall of tower, 147. 
Sins that brought Jesus to the 

Cross, 36. 
Slavery, 54, 261. 
Sleepers of Gospel story, 291. 
Social problem, 258^. 
Sorrow, Worship of, 150. 
Sower, 64, 67f. 
Squalor, 16. 
State, 126, 226ff. 
State, Christian, 235s, 270. 
State and Church, 2275. 
Steward, Unjust, 65, 23 iff. 
Suffering, see Pain. 
Surplus wealth, 243. 



Talents, 82. 



277 



Index 



Tares, 64, 67s. 

Ten Virgins, 41, 81, ill, tf>$. 

Thief, Dying, 88. 

Unchristian elements in social 

life, 26gi. 
Unmerciful servant, 69. 
Unready servant, 81. 

Veiling the eyes, 2532. 
Vinedressers, 69. 



War, 197s. 

Wealth, 24off. 

Wealth, Complexity of desire 

for, 246. 
Wealth, Temptations of, 249. 
Wedding feast, 69, in. 
Woman who was a " sinner," 

71, 95, no, 112, 252L 
Women of Gospels, 107ft, 152. 
Women's wages, 214I 

Zacchaeus, 73. 



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